I am at a school which is not very big on putting students' names and pictures on a public webserver. We do have an intranet server running right here in our building. With the support and advice of the Scratch Team and Scratch community, I was able to host Scratch files on our intranet server. Of course, hosting Scratch files on the Scratch server is the preferred option (sharing work and ideas and programming sequences, and accessing a larger audience), and we will do that for most of the Scratch files created by our students. However, an added benefit is that viewing the Scratch files hosted on our intranet server is lightening fast here in our building with practically no download time at all. Since we are in a location where connectivity problems arise, our intranet server has saved the day for our after school Scratch club. I look forward to discussing this with anyone intersted in a similar undertaking. We are running Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition on a regular student workstation.
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Congratulations!!
Yay! I am so glad you were able to fix the issues with the Windows Server you had. Could you briefly post the problems you had and how you solved them?
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The problem I experienced was that even though I had the following all in the same folder on the server: ScratchApplet.jar, <filename>.sb, sounbank.gb, and an .html file with the proper syntax , the server would not serve the Scratch file, that is, the start screen (with the green flag and red stop sign) would appear, but the Scratch program would not appear. The Scratch Team runs Scratch files on a computer running Apache, and it seemed no one in the Scratch community had experience with running Scratch files on an IIS, W2K3 Server, so I scratched my head (no pun intended) for months and kept kicking this idea around with andresmh and kevin_karplus on the Scratch Forums. Finally, in an epiphany, I thought I would check the MIME tables of the server, and I learned that by default IIS serves only files that are actually listed in the MIME tables. So I added following to the MIME types: .sb as "application/x-java-applet" (since that's how .class files were listed) and .gm as "application/octet-stream" (on the recommendation of johnm, on the Troubleshooting Forum), and PRESTO everything worked great! Three cheers for Scratch and the Scratch Community!
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Hi,
rico wrote:
However, an added benefit is that viewing the Scratch files hosted on our intranet server is lightening fast here in our building with practically no download time at all. Since we are in a location where connectivity problems arise, our intranet server has saved the day for our after school Scratch club.
If your main concern is connection speed and reliability, you could ask your IT people to set up a caching http proxy server for you, configured to aggressively cache the scratch galleries. It's been a while I did something like this, the most common choice was called "squid" at the time.
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scratch.mit.edu is so slow that I can see the attraction of having one's own server.
If the school I run my Tech club at had marginally adequate computer infrastructure, I'd be tempted to set up a server there.
Caching won't help much if kids are exploring projects, it will only help with repeated attempts to go to the same project.
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kevin_karplus wrote:
Caching won't help much if kids are exploring projects, it will only help with repeated attempts to go to the same project.
True. But have you observed a flock of kids in a computer classroom? "Hey everyone, check out this one!" :-)
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rico wrote:
So I added following to the MIME types: .sb as "application/x-java-applet" (since that's how .class files were listed) and .gm as "application/octet-stream" (on the recommendation of johnm, on the Troubleshooting Forum), and PRESTO everything worked great! Three cheers for Scratch and the Scratch Community!
Thanks rico. I can confirm that this worked for me. http://www.redware.com/scratch/playfish.html
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