The slides for the instructor are web-based.
The quickest way to teach this workshop is by providing students with a
server they can play around with. This can for example be done by
setting up a virtual machine in Microsoft Azure, as is discussed in the
second episode of this workshop, preferably
with an Ubuntu environment (as apt is used as an example and some of the screenshot show an Ubuntu environment).
There is an instructor package instructor_setup.tar.gz available. This contains a number of useful scripts, as well as a skeleton directory and file structure for the user accounts of the participants (this helps them get up to speed quickly. The skeleton directory with files used during the workshop can also be downloaded separately as userbase.tar.gz.
Setting up the Server
The workshop assume some standard versions of Java, Python and R are
available. It is useful if the teacher installs this software before the
start of the workshop. The script configure_server.sh can be used to
perform this on a fresh Azure installation of Ubuntu 18.04.
Creating accounts for Participants
A second step is to create user accounts for the users. The script
create_users.sh can be used for this purpose. It will use the
directory base (also in the package) as the skeleton for newly
created user accounts, and create a bunch of numbered user accounts
with some prefix (e.g. test1, test2, etcetera). Random passwords
are generated and saved into a .csv file that can be used to
communicate a username and password combination to each user.
Suppose we want to create 60 users prefixed by test with
random passwords of length 12 and save their passwords to the
file workshop-users.csv, you run the following command:
$ ./create_users.sh -n 60 -p test -f workshop-users.csv -l 12 -c
Note that some options are optional: the default prefix is test,
and the default password length is 12. The -c flag is required
to actually create the users and set the password. If ommitted,
only a csv-file with username/password combinations will be created.
Resetting a participant’s home directory
Finally, during the workshop it may happen that a users accidentally
deletes all the files during one episode, which may make things tricky
during another episode. The script reset_user.sh can be used to
copy the base directory to the home directory of the user,
recreating the deleted files and giving the correct permissions.
To restore all the base files to the home account of a user, run
$ sudo ./reset_user -u username
Optionally, you can add the -c flag, which will first wipe the home directory before the base files are copied. In most cases this flag
should not be required.