Hi Juan,

I would want to know the activity ID of each VPL activity. But, the $id variable inside /mod/vpl/view.php doesn't provide with the right activity ID that is stored in the database.  

For example, the $id variable now states the activity ID to be 458 in my production server. But the maximum ID value is only 375 in VPL table

What would be the right approach to knowing the activity ID stored in the database for any specific VPL activity?

Thanks,

Praveen Kumar

Hello Andrey,

I suppose that you are using a prebuilt “jail system” then please post the “vpl_run.sh” file of the C++ activity to have a complete picture.

A simple content of “vpl_run.sh” for C++ may look like this

---------begin of file--------------
#!/bin/sh
g++ -Wall -o vpl_execution *.cpp
----------end of file--------------

Best regards

Hello Andrey,
Your problem seems to be that you have set a too low memory size limit. You must increase the memory size limit to16MB or a higher value in order  to run g++ and compile a C++ program.
Best regards

Dear Omer,
Sorry, but we are not planning to release a VPL version compatible with Moodle 1.7 or 1.8. We are planning, in a near future, to release a VPL version for Moodle 2.0.

Best regards

Hello Oleg,

The use of automatic program testing is one of the main target of VPL. The libraries can be used in two ways: as source code  files of a VPL's activity, (they must be added in the “execution files” configuration page , better in a VPL activity shared as “based on”), or as software installed in every jail-servers you use.

To use one assignment for different tasks you can use “Variations”.  The variations define sets of different requirements for an assignment.  Each student will be randomly assigned a variation. Each variation has an identification code and a description. The variation description is shown to the students with the assignment description. The identification code is reported in the vpl_enviroment.sh , so it can be used in the script files (vpl_execution.sh, vpl_evaluation.sh) to do different actions depending on it.

Another way to control different task for one assignment may be to write a complex script able to detect the type of assignment submitted by checking , by example,the file names submitted by the student.

Best regards.

Congratulations Juan. Looks very interesting though I have not installed it to look properly yet.

A short video would be great to go with the screenshoots to give people a flavour. Any plans to add PHP?

- Eamon

Hi Udara,

The “vpl_run.sh” file that you use has some typewrite errors:

-       Line 5: change – for =

-       Line 6: the second PATH must be $PATH

-       Line 9: VPL_SUBFILE0 must be $VPL_SUBFILE0

-       Line 10: NAME must be $NAME

I recommend to use OpenJDK instead of GCJ.

I see, Inspecting the attached file, that you need to increase the maxmemory size value at least to 128Mb to run a java program.

You don't need to install any proxy server. The proxy of the documentation is an internal part of the VPL module.

Best regard.

Dear Juan,

I want to ask you about VPL plugin. Because I want to try this plugin. If I want to install this plugin on Windows OS (Windows XP or 7), how I should do for the installation? I have try to install the VPL plugin but I do not know when I have to fill the Jail servers list. I do not find the jai system for Windows. I only find the jail system for linux. How I suppose to do? Thanks for your help.

Warmly,

Eka

What a great plugin VPL is. Students like the "evaluate" to get immediate results.

We got the jail working on Gentoo and some memory checks needed to be disabled but now this works we find we need more documentation on the scripts and on the "similarity" function. What do those 95/98/ 73/ numbers in red tell me about the similarity?

Is there more documentation or a wiki where we can help adding documentation?

We would like to add "fixed/readonly" files to a C/C++ assignment requested files. To add some functions students must call but not change. Is that possible without hacking scripts?

Hello!!!

VPL 1.4 is compatible with MOODLE 2.x?

Hello Gaurav,

it seems that you have set a so low memory limit that de C++  compiler (the evaluation program is written in C++) can’t run properly.
Try increasing the memory limit to at least 64Mb. Beware that you can set the memory limit value in two places (at each VPL instance and at the general setting of VPL module) and the lower one will be used.

Best regards.

Hello,

I'm trying to get moodle to run with VPL, but I still have some problems. Here's my setup: moodle_latest-19, VPL module 1.4.1, VPL jail system 1.2. I followed the tutorial " How to install a VPL jail system in Ubuntu" to set up the jail system. I also tried the live CD, but if anything, this made things worse.

I can telnet into the jail server and it says "ready" in the "check jails" tab under "execution". So far so good..

I've set up some small "hello world" test assignments, namely for C++ and Java. I intend to use it solely with Java later, but this is just for the sake of testing. I inserted "output = Hello world" to vpl_evaluate.cases in all assignments and left the other files blank/empty. Now to the problems:

• I can successfully evaluate a C++ submission. It says "1 tests run/ 0 tests failed" (the test fails, when I change/corrupt the submission, so evaluation really seems to work). When I try to evaluate a Java submission I get:

Compilation
mmap failed for CEN and END part of zip file
Error occurred during initialization of VM
java/lang/ClassNotFoundException: error in opening JAR file
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/rt.jar
Not compiled
Comments
The compilation or preparation of execution has failed

• I cannot simply "run" a submission, neither in C++ nor in Java. It just says "running" and then (after 30secs) "running (Timeout)".

I have no idea what's going on here, any help is greatly appreciated.

regards

papagiorgio

After the installation of a new Gentoo linux with latest g++ compiler we found a serious bug in vpl_evaluate.cpp:

        static Evaluation* getSinglenton() {
                if (singlenton == NULL) {
                        singlenton = new Evaluation();
                }
        }

This function should return the singlenton variable. The patch for mod/jail/default_scripts/vpl_evaluate.cpp is:

750d749
<               return singlenton;
941c940
<                       printf("Testing %d/%ld : %s\n",i+1,testCases.size(),testCases[i].getCaseDescription().c_str());
---
>                       printf("Testing %d/%d : %s\n",i+1,testCases.size(),testCases[i].getCaseDescription().c_str());

The printf fix prevents a warning about the %d that should be %ld.

Does this version of VPL works for Moodle 2.3?

Is there a documentation or a manual on how to use VPL like how to set up the cases and others?

Thanks before

Hello, I am testing VPL 2.0 and I have a problem with automatic evaluation. Testing a Hello World in Java, I have created the file vpl_evaluate .cases with two lines:

case=test1

output="Hello World"

When the automatic evaluation run the test fail with this result

Incorrect program result 
--- Input --- 

--- Program output --- 

stty: standard input: Invalid argument
Hello World

--- Expected output --- 

Hello World

The problem is the line with the error of stty. Is this a problem with my jail system? I have installed the jail system with the liveCD in a VirtualBox  machine. 

Thank you for your excellent work.

Hello Juan,

I would like to know how I could integrate tools like checkstyle and JUnit to make an evaluation more complete? and which are the archives to modify?

Thanks in advance.

¡Hola!

We're currently trying to install VPL for a university project.
The setup is as follows:
- Moodle Server: openSUSE 11.4 + Moodle 2.3 + VPL 2.0.2
- Jail Server: Ubuntu 12.04 + Jail system 1.2

Both machines run as VMs, have access to the internet and are accessible from the university intranet only. At the moment we've got two points that we seem to be unable to resolve:

1) Run / Debug
When I put in a HelloWorld-application in C or Python evaluation works as expected. The code is executed and graded according to the evaluation cases configured.
Hitting the "Run" or "Debug" button, however, results in a timeout. No console window is shown either.
When I try the demo course (http://demovpl.dis.ulpgc.es/moodle/) it works fine - so it's probably not an issue with the browser or Java plugin.

The moodle Server is running the susefirewall2 and I've configured it to allow access to TCP and UDP ports 22, 80 and 51001-51500.
I've tried both the default run-files and custom ones with the same result.
The firewall-log messages don't show any allowed or rejected connections to ports 51001 to 51500 - only ports 22 and 80.
The Jail-Server isn't running any firewall - although I've tried activating one to log the incoming and outgoing messages.

Have you got any further suggestions based on what differences there are between run/debug and evaluate?

2) Java
Unlike the other programming languages, Java code cannot even be evaluated.
When evaluating, the JVM cannot start up due to the following message:

execution.txt:
Comment :=>>-The compilation or preparation of execution has failed
<|--
Error occurred during initialization of VM
Could not reserve enough space for object heap
Could not create the Java virtual machine.
Not compiled
--|>
Grade :=>>0.00000

The settings that I've figured out which influence this are as follows:
Moodle -> Settings -> VPL Administration -> Advanced settings -> Maximum execution resource limits -> Maximum memory used: 256 MiB
Moodle -> Site administration -> Plugins -> Activity modules -> Virtual programming lab -> Maximum memory used: 512 MiB
Moodle -> Site administration -> Plugins -> Activity modules -> Virtual programming lab -> Maximum default memory used: 256 MiB
vpl_run.sh: javac -Xmx16m; java -Xmx16m
Memory free: 1,5GiB

I've tried changing these values and also adding -Xms Parameters - but with no different result.
I've also tried switching from the standard OpenJDK to the Oracle JDK 7 - didn't change anything either.
Running exaclty the same javac-command locally on the machine works without any problems. The only way to reproduce the error-message on the commandline was to add a -Xms larger than 4GiB (Server has only 2GiB RAM).
Do you know of any further settings that may be associated with this error or possible complications with the current (default) values?

Saludos,
  Michael

Hi Jan and all,

The plan to replace the editor based on Java Applet by one based on HTML5 + JavaScript, remains, especially with the security problems arising from the Java Applet in last and current year. Although we have made some progress in this development, we have not achieved a full functional version and does not seem to be near.

I will try to answer your questions about java output terminal.
A 1. At this moment, you cannot save the program output to a file which is stored in the Moodle server. To get something similar, you must write, in the configuration file "vpl_evaluate.sh", the following:
----------------------------
#/bin/sh
. vpl_run.sh
----------------------------
this will make that when you push "evaluate" the program output will be saved as the result of the automatic evaluation.
I add to the list of tasks to be done: to allow copy text from the terminal to the clipboard

A 2. Sorry, but the output terminal is almost a dumb terminal and it does not emulate terminals as "VT100". This feature has been for a long time in the TODO list and still is there. 

Best regards.