Re: octave on server

[Christoph Dalitz]

On Thu,  2 Oct 2003 10:43:38 +0200
"address@hidden" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>   I'm just a newbie of octave, so any hint could really help me. I'm trying to
> install octave on a server, and users can access octave through a Php web page
> where they input datas and choose a model to process their datas. My problem 
> is
> that I can't execute octave on the server (for security reasons), and I should
> only use octave's libs. Is this a correct way to gain security? Is there any
> other way?
> And most of all: how can I use a function without execute octave?
>
Some thoughts on possible realisations:

 a) Implementing a web interface might be possible, but is probably some
    effort and requires some skills in system programming (pipes, threads, etc.)
    The most annoying problem is how to implement the concept of a session
    so that proviously defined functions/variables survive. Having solved this,
    the hard part comes: you will need to write an application server that
    handles several open sessions and creates a process for each session
    which communicates via anonymous pipes with a private octave process.

    Making this solution to work probably requires at least three weeks
    programming by an experienced programmer.

 b) Something that can be setup within a day would be to install ocatve
    on a server and give the users ssh accounts. If the users shall *only*
    run octave and nothing else, you can change their login shell to octave
    (in that case you should look for a way to disable the system() function
    and alike in octave).

Christoph



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