Setting Up the Server

• It must have an IP address of 172.16.1.1. This need not be its only address, but the CD configuration expects the server to be at this address. On a Linux system, you can configure eth0 with the server's "normal" IP address and eth0:0 with 172.16.1.1. When running PC², the "official" hostname (returned by the hostname command) must be one that corresponds to 172.16.1.1 (this is due to a flaw in the Java RMI library used by PC²).

  For similar reasons, it is important that each client machine "know" its own hostname. If your DHCP server does not provide hostname information, the following lines

  hostname localhost.localdomain # just to test following line
hostname $(ypcat hosts | fgrep $(ifconfig eth0 | fgrep 'inet addr' \
     | sed 's/^ *inet addr://;s/ *Bcast.*$//') | awk '{print $2}')

  added to a shared /misc/contest/local-setup file will take care of the problem.

  For a multi-site contest, the server's "official" hostname must correspond to an IP address that the other site servers can access. Commands can be added to the /misc/contest/local-setup file to adjust the client firewalling to allow clients to access the server regardless of which IP address PC² reports. For example, if the "true" IP address of the contest server is a.b.c.d and the clients are Fedora Core-based, adding the following lines to local-setup

  iptables -I RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -s a.b.c.d -j ACCEPT
iptables -I RH-Firewall-1-OUTPUT -d a.b.c.d -j ACCEPT
route add default gw contest-server

  should do the trick.
• Group id 500 must be used for the "judge" group
• There must be at least n+1 team accounts, team0 through teamn, to support an n team contest. Each team must have its own group, and team home directories must be owned by root, belong to the specific team group, and have a mode of 770 (owner everything, group everything). For example, the following Unix commands will properly configure the team0 home directory:

  chown root:team0 /home/team0
chmod 770 /home/team0

• There must be at least m judge accounts, judge1 through judgem, to allow for m contest judges. The judge accounts should all belong to and be readable/traversable by the judge group.
• There must be a pc2 account for administering the contest.

  The administration scripts tarball should be untarred in the pc2 home directory. The PC² software should be installed here, as well (the Sun Java JDK, 1.4.2_05 or better, is necessary for PC²). Note that the PC² tarball must be untarred in the parent of the pc2 home directory, rather than in the home directory itself. Configuring PC² is described in the PC² Contest Administrator's Guide.

• It must use NIS to distribute account, host, and automount information. The NIS domain name must be "programming.contest.net". The host map must provide names for all client machines. The automount maps must provide for client mounting of home directories. Optionally, the automount maps may provide for a shared /misc directory, which may be used for site-specific data or initialization scripts
• It must export home directories using NFS, restricting access to the 172.16.x.x subnet, if possible.
• It should allow remote logging from client machines, which usually means adding the "-r" option when starting syslogd. On a Fedora Core-based system, this is done in the /etc/sysconfig/syslog file.
• It should run a print server, such as CUPS, sharing its printers with machines on the 172.16.x.x subnet.
• It should run a web server, on which the initial page should display a scoreboard. The header frame in the sample can be modified as desired.
• If make-slips is going to be used to generate team/judge account/password handouts, LaTeX needs to be installed.
• If ssh/telnet/ftp/etc. servers are running, team accounts must be prevented from using these services to access the server.
• A DHCP server must be configured (not necessarily on the contest server machine) to give each client its IP address and host name (the latter is important for PC²). A simple (Linux) dhcpd.conf file can accomplish this if the DHCP server has access to the NIS hosts information.

The pc2 account requires a number of necessary initializations:

Login to the server as pc2.

Add the line umask 077 to the end of the .bashrc file. Logout and login again, checking to make sure that the umask is now properly set.

The permissions of previously installed files (see above) should be carefully checked. The home directory itself should have 711 permissions (owner everything, others traversable). Everything else should world-readable (and executable/traversable, where appropriate) with the following exceptions: The scripts directory should be world-traversable only, and only the run script should be world-readable/executable. The default 077 umask should ensure that any new files created by PC² or by the administration scripts are accessible only by the pc2 account (and, of course, root).

Modify the pc2v8.ini file to specify 172.16.1.1 as the server address in its [client] section. Edit the sitelist.ini file to specify the proper site information, and set the site= lines in pc2v8.ini appropriately.

If you are using version 8.5 of PC², modify the start-server script to pass a -first option to the server rather than --first. Versions earlier than 8.5 may require extensive script modifications.

mkdir data judge-data
chmod a+x data
chgrp judge judge-data     # must be root for this one
chmod 770 judge-data

The team0 account is configured as a "template" for the other team accounts:

Boot up a client, login as team0, and configure the desktop as desired for the contest. A "launcher" should be placed on the desktop (or panel) to run the /home/pc2/pc2team script (using the /home/pc2/pc2.ico icon). The lines

CLASSPATH=/home/pc2:$CLASSPATH
export CLASSPATH

should be added to the pc2team script (or, alternately, can be added to the .bashrc file).

If the current directory is to be automatically searched for executables, the line

PATH=.:$PATH

can be added to .bashrc.

The team's web browser should be configured to use http://contest-server/ as its home page.

The pc2v8.ini file should be copied from /home/pc2 (a symlink will work just as well).

Optionally, the desktop background can be set to a contest-specific bitmap. The file acm-background.png (created by Adam Florence) is provided here (and in the /opt/bitmaps directory on the client CD) as a sample.

Printing should be configured in the .bashrc (or, alternately, in a shared /misc/contest/local-setup) file. The details of this will vary depending on the print server being used. For example, a CUPS server might require the following lines:

CUPS_SERVER="contest-server"
export CUPS_SERVER
lpoptions -d "PRINTER"

where the actual value used for PRINTER will depend on circumstances. It could be as simple as specifying a single printer for everyone, or as complex as determining the printer name from the current hostname. Once the team0 account has been configured, the client can be logged off and powered down. Login as root on the server, and create a "skeleton" tarball that can be used to initialize the other team accounts:

cd /home/team0
tar cvfz ../team-skeleton.tar.gz .

The judge1 account should be configured similarly to the team0 account, except that the pc2judge script should be used instead of pc2team, and the "skeleton" tarball should be named judge-skeleton.tar.gz.