I will be putting up notes about how I am teaching with Sakai – I will code them all with the string pedagogy in them to make searching easier in amonsgt all the nerdy posts as well.
So far I am having great fun with Sakai – pre class start I have made my course site and published it – I have very few tools enabled:
Announcements
Polls
E-Mail Archive
I set it up knowing that students are still adding and dropping the course – as soon as they see it – they see the “welcome announcement” and are told to review the E-Mail archive.
I am taking a very valuable (both to me and the students) poll to gauge student experience level and am involving the students in the book selection via the E-Mail archive.
I make it very clear in the welcome announcement that any pre-class start participation is completely *optional*. Being able to later delete announcements is pedagocialy important to me because once class starts – the pre-class announcement is no longer relevant at all and would be distracting if I could not delete it.
This is a good reason to let faculty pre-setup and publsh their classes under their own control – not waiting for tech support to run some script. I will reveal Sylabus, Resources, iTunesU, etc on my schedule – not tech support’s schedule.

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I tried SVN 1.3 and SVN 1.4 – it would not get through configure.
SVN 1.2.0 worked – but it even spewed some errors – but it worked well enough to get command line svn working – which was all I cared about.
cd
mkdir dev
cd dev
curl -O http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.2.0.zip
unzip subversion-1.2.0.zip
cd subversion-1.2.0
./configure –prefix=`pwd` –without-berkeley-db –with-zlib –with-ssl
make
make install (this failed with an error message)
./subversion/clients/cmdline/svn help (yay)
cd
alias svn=~/dev/subversion-1.2.0/subversion/clients/cmdline/svn
mkdir zap
cd zap
svn co https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/csev/trunk/scripts/ zzz
This bit was helpful:
http://www.hostmonsterforum.com/showthread.php?t=1294&highlight=subversion

I sent this letter to 1and1 tech support – figured I would share it here.
Domain: dr-chuck.com
I just wanted to drop you a note about Ruby on Rails hosting. I really like 1and1 a *lot* – I have used it for four years – and while I started in the free professional package – I have spent a lot of money and felt that my 1and1 services were a good value – I am so pleased that I put 1and1 ads on all my main pages.
Recently I became interested in Ruby on Rails – I initially tried to get ROR running on my 1and1 account and was even thinking of adding a second hosting plan just to do RoR – but since it was hard to set up – I decided to go with a service that simply supports RoR directly – hostmonster.com.
I will stay with 1and1.com – probably forever for my basic web hosting and domain name stuff – but as my interest grows in RoR – I will naturally begin to do new work at hostmonster.com.
So I am just wishing and suggesting that you come up with a supported RoR service – I would be happy to pay another $5-10 for it and happy for it to be another service. I really would like to stick with one vendor – keeps my life simpler for these hobby web sites.
Thanks for such a fine service.
Dr. Charles Severance
www.dr-chuck.com

Last week I got Sakai automatically building on the NMI test facility at Wisconsin. Here is a status page:
http://grandcentral.cs.wisc.edu/pavlo/index.php?page=results%2Foverview&opt_user=csev
Here are my scripts in SVN:
https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/csev/trunk/nmi/sakaimvn/
The submit file is the master control – here is my sample:
$ cat sakaiMaven2.submit
project = sakai
component = Trunk Build
component_version = 1.0.0
description = Auto-build of Sakai trunk (cron)
run_type = Build
inputs = sakaiMaven2.scp, sakaiMaven2.svn, m2-repo.scp
remote_task = buildSakai.sh
remote_task_args = “sakai/trunk sakai”
platforms = x86_macos_10.4
prereqs_x86_macos_10.4 = java-1.5.0_06
notify = csev@umich.edu
I need Java 1.5 – the simplest is to use the mac OS 10.4 systems for my builds. Later I will develop scripts for other operating systems.
The inputs specify what you want on your execution machine and how to get it there. I have three inputs.
The first copies all my shell scripts from the current directory to the destination machine using SCP.
[csev@nmi-s003 sakaimvn]$ cat sakaiMaven2.scp
method = scp
scp_file = /home/csev/sakaimvn/*.sh
recursive = true
The second input checks a particular tag out of SVN of the Sakai source.
[csev@nmi-s003 sakaimvn]$ cat sakaiMaven2.svn
method = svn
url = https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/sakai/trunk sakai
The third copies a copy of a populated Maven 2 repository from my home directory on the submitting machine to the executing machine.
[csev@nmi-s003 sakaimvn]$ cat m2-repo.scp
method = scp
scp_file = /home/csev/.m2
recursive = true
As the source changes the .m2 repo will become out of date so I have to tar up a full repo from my dev machine from time to time and copy it over.
The script to be run is pretty complex – I will point out a few important steps.
In link-repo.sh the key line is
ln -s `pwd`/.m2 ~/.m2
The input directive will insure that the .m2 directory makes it into the execution directory – by soft linking it into home, Maven 2 will find it.
In nmi-bootstrap.sh the code is a bit tortuous – probably the clever bit is downloading a copy of Maven 2 and using the local copy.
I debugged this script separately on my mac before making it work on the NMI test bed.
I instlal Maven 2 each time the script runs – I use:
curl -O http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/apache/maven/binaries/maven-2.0.7-bin.tar.gz
Then extract it into my local directory and simply use
`pwd`/maven-2.0.7/bin/mvn
As my call to maven 2. This way I install my own pre-requisite and don’t have to depend on anything except for Java.
Once this is done, I put in a crontab to automate this:
[csev@nmi-s003 ~]$ crontab -l
MAILTO=csev@umich.edu
22 04 * * * $HOME/nightly.sh
[csev@nmi-s003 ~]$ cat nightly.sh
#!/bin/sh
PATH=$PATH:/nmi/bin:/usr/local/condor/bin
cd sakaimvn
nmi_submit sakaiMaven2.submit
Thanks to Jim Basney and everyone who helped walk me through the process. it took less than a day to get it all working.
Also thanks to the folks at Wisconsin who walked me through the process.

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