[Building Sakai] Sakai

[Charles Hedrick]

The install document Mustansar points to is pretty good. It would help  
to know more about what you want. Are you asking how to try it out, or  
how to move from a testing setup to production? You say you're a  
student, but I assume you're working for your campus administrative  
group. If you're looking to set up a parallel student-run system most  
of these comments would still apply, but you might not be able to or  
need to interface into the official systems.

For the latter,  I strongly recommend that at some point you start  
building from source, but you can do quite a bit of testing with the  
demo version. In fact we ran in production for at least a semester  
that way.

With 4800 students you won't need a complex production environment. A  
single front end would serve that number of people. While most people  
would run separate front end and database systems, you could probably  
get by with a single machine. Centos is a good choice. If you use Java  
6 (which is not officially supported, and requires one additional  
argument at startup, -Dsun.lang.ClassLoader.allowArraySyntax=true) you  
don't need complex Java tuning, although you will need some. E.g. on a  
16 GB machine we use

-d64 -Dsun.lang.ClassLoader.allowArraySyntax=true -Xmx13000m - 
Xms13000m -Xmn3g -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+UseParNewGC - 
XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:PermSize=64m

You should use something like this for maxpermsize no matter the size  
of your system. The other sizes adjust with the size of your system. I  
would no longer recommend using -Xmn3g. I'd specify just the the size  
of perm and the overall system size (-Xmx and -Xms) and let the system  
decide on new (-Xmn). For your user population you don't need 16 GB,  
but I'd try to use 4 or preferably 8 GB.

For a database mysql and oracle are both widely used. Use Oracle if  
you have people around with good Oracle skills. Otherwise I'd probably  
use mysql.

As for things to do, you will probably want to tie users and passwords  
to your university's system. If you have good Java programmers,  
there's a set of APIs that let you write a "provider" to interface  
Sakai to your University's systems. If you have LDAP available, there  
are existing providers to use that as a source for user/password data.

If you want to avoid having faculty type in their rosters, you'll want  
to tie it to your roster data in some way. You can write a provider  
for that as well, although many schools take a nightly dump of the  
rosters and write something like perl scripts to put the data directly  
into Sakai's database. That's probably the easier approach.

Many folks here would be happy to give you sample setups for this. It  
would probably be helpful for you to say what software is being used  
for your student administrative system, your user directory and  
passwords, and any single signon system you may be using. Others may  
have written interface code.

There are a number of setup options in sakai.properties and elsewhere  
that will affect the nature of your system. One decision to make is  
how open the system should be. Sakai can be set up so that anyone can  
create an account. It can have different categories of users with  
different abilities. We run a pretty open system. We make no  
distinction between faculty, staff and students. All can create sites,  
even course sites. All can put outsiders into their sites as guests.  
We don't allow outsiders to create an account on their own, but any  
faculty staff or student do it for them. The only difference between  
faculty and students is that only someone who is authorized can attach  
the official roster to a site, and that would normally be a faculty  
member. But a student could create a site for their course and invite  
the students to join it. (This is sometimes done for student-led study  
groups.)


On Sep 3, 2009, at 6:03 PM, Mustansar Mehmood wrote:

> This document should help you
> http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DOC/Install+Guide+(2.6)
> <http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/DOC/Install+Guide+%282.6%29 
> >
> --mustansar
> harish sreenivas wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I am a student at SPSU (GA). We are trying to implement sakai. I have
>> it installed on a CentOS system and have it running. I am so confused
>> on how to go on from there. Can anyone give me instructions on how to
>> go about it. We currently run VISTA 8 here. I am not clear where to
>> find instructions about this. Any help would be greatly  
>> appreciated. I
>> am the only on working on this so it appears all weird to me.
>>
>> Thanks in advance
>> Harish C Sreenivas
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not  
>> exist
>> in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
>> Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure."
>>
>> Harish C Sreenivas
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
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