zakkak / turnin

turnin is a utility that enables students to turnin assignments using the command line. Requires a setup where each class has a unix account in the computer infrastructure of the school/university.

turnin

turnin is a unix utility that allows students to turn in their homework from the School/Univerity's computers.

Setup

The root user needs to download (git clone) all files in this repository and run make; make install; make clean. Please note that this cannot be done with sudo(8) and needs access to the actual root user. This series of bash(1) commands will compile, place, and activate the turnin binary. It will also create a man(1) entry with further instructions for both professors and students.

Requirements

• gcc
• make
• tar
• libssl-dev on debian
• git (For download and updates)

Usage for professors/TAs

A set of unix computers is required that both classes and students have access to from a unique unix account. Each class has a home directory and it can create a folder named TURNIN. If this folder is available then other unix accounts can turn in exercises to it. In order to create an assignment, i.e. Homework1, the class has to create a folder inside the TURNIN folder with the name Homework1. Please refer to the manpage (man turnin) for further details.

History

The program was first written in 1993 and then updated to fix some bugs and security flaws. The original repository can be found here. It has been created for SunOS 5 but then with updates it was able to run in modern operating systems like debian as well. On September 1st, 2014, Foivos S. Zakkak and Antonios A. Chariton (zakkak & DaKnOb) forked the original repository and created a new version of turnin that is more secure (it patches several exploitable vulnerabilities found in the original code, minimizes attack surface), faster and with partly extended functionality. On September 6th, 2014, official support for SunOS5 has been dropped. A few days later, both projects went under the GPL v3 License after contacting all the authors and agreeing to it.

Development

Pull requests

Pull requests are always welcome. Please respect the coding style and stay consistent. In your pull request you should describe exactly what it solves and in the case that you use some complex logic/algorithm please describe it as well. We would really appreciate if you could provide comments and explain most if not all parts of your code so we can maintain it, understand it and perform (security) audits. Since this is a suid-root binary, we need to establish the maximum amount of security possible for a C-written program.

New release

To create a new release first create an annotated tag (it would be nice if it is also signed), i.e.,

git tag -s -m "Release v2.2.2" v2.2.2

and then push the tags

git push --tags

Versions

The version for development builds is retrieved automatically through the command git describe at compilation time (see target version in the Makefile).

However since the .git directory is not contained in the release archives we still need to manually upgrade the version in src/version.sed.me before a release.