CNT5605 &mdash 2009 Fall
Group Assignment 5
Journals Due Wednesday, November 4th, at the beginning of class.

Assignment: CMS




Your objective is to set up a Content Management System (CMS). It should be available on ip 192.168.10.(N*10+7) where N is your group number (for instance, group 5's CMS should be available on 192.168.10.57).

For this assignment, you will use Drupal 6, which is available at drupal.org; the most recent 6.x version is 6.14 (note, by the way, that the White House has also recently adopted Drupal: White House Uses Open Source To Open Government (October 26, 2009).)

The first step for this assignment is to install a mysql server; unlike the default assumption of Drupal that the mysql server is on the same machine as the webserver, please instead install mysql-server on your physical CentOS box.

Inside of mysql, you should then create a new database called drupal, and a new mysql user drupal associated with the webserver ip mentioned in the first paragraph (this is not an actual username on the system — this user is a mysql user, and you should look at the mysql documentation available at mysql.com to see how to create this user). Remember, the security exercise is going on and this user will need permission to come in from the network since the CMS is going to be running a machine separate from the database server.

Next, reconfigure your virtual CentOS guest installation on your Fedora host machine. You will need to change the type of network adapter so that your virtual machine is now using one of the lab's ip numbers rather than the virtual NAT numbers that VirtualBox had set up by default. Next, get the network working using the ip number in the first paragraph (internally, your virtual CentOS instance is configured in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts to also use NAT on a virtual network, so you will have to make changes here to statically use the lab 192.168.10.* network.)

Now on the virtual CentOS installation, download Drupal 6 and install it. (Copious documentation is available on the Drupal website.) Please post some content and create one regular Drupal user named "myuser" with a password "mypassword". For content, you may use anything you like (a simple poll, or you can use wget to grab real data from, say, www.cs.fsu.edu, or perhaps you might want to create some content around a seasonal theme).

On Wednesday, November 4th, I will use a portion of class to visit each of your Drupal sites so we can all admire your handiwork, so please make sure that everything is working during the class period.



A journal is due for this assignment. Make sure that you document in your journal all of the steps that you went through, following the guidelines on the class home page.

Please turn in a printed copy of this assignment at the beginning of class on Wednesday, November 4th.