Rewrote the bomb request daemon, bomb-requestd.pl to
be more robust and easier for the students to use. The new daemon is
based on HTTP, and is extremely simple:
- Students request a bomb by pointing their Web browser at the host
and port number of the request daemon, and then filling out a form with
their team member information.
- The request daemon builds a bomb, packs it up in a tar file, and
returns it to the student's Web browser.
This new version has significant advantages over the previous email
based version:
- Students receive their bombs immediately.
- Students no longer need to use uudecode to save their
bombs.
- Some email clients apply unexpected encodings to Subject lines
that caused the old daemon to miss some requests. This is no longer an
issue in the new daemon.
Thanks to Prof. Umberto Villano, Universita' del Sannio.
- The old daemon maintained hard state in the form of disk file
containing the number of requests in the spool file that it had
responded to. If this file were removed or reset, the daemon would
send new bombs to everyone who had previously requested a bomb, and
worse, erase its record of the old bombs. This can no longer happen
with the new request daemon.
Thanks to Prof. Al Davis, Univ of Utah.