stay anonymous (or not) with oet.sandcats.io

oet-sandcats-io_stayanon

By hosting applications using sandstorm.io at oet.sandcats.io, users can can enforce access control on each application. By default, a newly-created application grain (such as an Etherpad document) is private. Through the user interface, you can grant other people access to the grain with varying permission levels, you can inspect who has access, and you can revoke that access.

Below is a screenshot of the options for sharing access to WordPress in oet.sandcats.io.

oet-sandcats-wordpress-sharing

The majority of the applications in oet.sandcats.io allow users to share author/edit access to the application without the need to login.  This allows applications to be accessed anonymously.

I think this ‘stay anonymous’ access is a fantastic feature for educators and frees classes from the need to manage username/password arrangements.  I see this as one of the killer features of SPLOTS – remove the username/password obstacle to open up a new palette for ‘just in time’ access to web applications for teaching and learning.

I explored the applications at oet.sandcats.io and have classified which applications currently offer:

  • ‘stay anonymous’ access with author/edit participation
  • anonymous access to read (requiring login for edit/author participation)
  • required login to access and/or participate
  • anonymous read access + required login to access and/or participate + domain mapping

I have added links to the the respective applications repos in the event folks would like to dig deeper into each app and its features.

 

Supports ‘stay anonymous’ access with author/edit participation in oet.sandcats.io

Supports anonymous access to read (requires login for edit/author participation)

 

Domain mapping + anonymous read access + edit/author access with login

 

Requires login to access and/or participate

 

 

 

 

Mapping a domain to Davros with oet.sandcats.io

I am collaborating with a great bunch of folks in BC highered on shared infrastructure – Clint has written about the capacity we are building and our opensource app hosting using the sandstorm.io framework.

We have been running oet.sandcats.io in Educloud since November 2015 and have 72 instructional designers, faculty, and technologists with 255 app instances (grains) to date.

Think of a ‘grain’ much like you would software containers and operating-system-level virtualization, but with unique features. As Sandstorm.io describes it:

The idea is simple: take your large web app and split it into small “services” running in separate containers. Services are separated by functionality: you might have an authentication service, a payment service, a search service, and so on.

Sandstorm takes a wildly different approach: It containerizes objects, where an object is primarily defined by data. We call each Sandstorm container a “grain”, because it is fine-grained.

I have been working quite a bit with the framework and working on packing opensource applications currently not available. I haven’t been writing about my work so I figured I’m overdue to start posting about how I’m using oet.sandcats.io and outlining my forays in packaging opensource applications for hosting at oet.sandcats.io.

For today’s post – how I mapped Dropbox-clone Davros (https://github.com/mnutt/davros) to a subdomain of networkeffects.ca

  1. Get your Davros grain open.
  2. Navigate to the [Publishing] area.
  3. Fill in your desired sub/domain2016-02-29_19-16-19
  4. Make your CNAME and TXT entries in your DNS Zone Editor (my CPanel views below)2016-02-29_19-19-21
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  5. Put an empty index.html file in your Davros grain.
  6. Give your DNS entries some time to take hold. (mine took around 20 minutes)
  7. Upload a file to your Davros grain.
  8. Put your mapped sub/domain in front of the filename you just uploaded.
  9. Shared! http://files.networkeffects.ca/rick-gif.gif

Now, for any file you put in this grain, you can easily share it on the web by placing the sub/domain on the front of the filename.

Davros at oet.sandcats.io has a 2GB file upload limit.  By navigating to the [Clients] area of the app you can generate values that allow you to synchronize this app to a ownCloud client desktop client. Select one or more directories on your local machine and always have access to your latest files wherever you are.

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