Dirtbags Monarch Of The Hill Server

This is a set of thingies to run our Monarch-Of-The-Hill contest, which in the past has been called "Tracer FIRE", "Project 2", "HACK", "Queen Of The Hill", and "Cyber FIRE".

Information about these events is at http://dirtbags.net/contest/

This software serves up puzzles in a manner similar to Jeopardy. It also track scores, and comes with a JavaScript-based scoreboard to display team rankings.

How everything works

This section wound up being pretty long. Please check out the overview for details.

Dependencies

If you're using Xubuntu 14.04 LTS, you should have everything you need except LUA and Markdown.

$ sudo apt-get install lua5.2 markdown -y

How to set it up

It's made to be virtualized, so you can run multiple contests at once if you want. If you want to run it out of /opt/moth, do the following:

$ mkdir -p /opt/moth/mycontest
$ ./install /opt/moth/mycontest
$ cp mothd /opt/moth

Yay, you've got it set up.

Installing Puzzle Categories

Puzzle categories are distributed in a different way than the server. After setting up (see above), just run

$ /opt/moth/mycontest/bin/install-category /path/to/my/category

If you want to create puzzles, also check out How to Create Puzzle Categories.

Running It

Get your web server to serve up your contest. In addition to static files, it'll need to do CGI. Here's one way to do it on Xubuntu 14.04 LTS with lighttpd where the contest is at /opt/moth/mycontest and mothd is running as user moth:

First, install lighttpd and backup the configuration:

$ sudo apt-get install lighttpd -y
$ cp /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf.orig

Add mod_cgi to the ServerModules section, an alias to point to your contest, and CGI handling for your contest files to /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf:

alias.url = ("/moth" => "/opt/moth/mycontest/www")
$HTTP["url"] =~ "/moth/" {
cgi.assign = (".cgi" => "/usr/bin/lua")
}

Restart your server:

$ sudo service lighttpd restart
* Stopping web server lighttpd  [ OK ]
* Starting web server lighttpd  [ OK ]

Make sure user moth can access your content and run the daemon.

$ sudo chown -R moth:moth /opt/moth/mycontest
$ sudo -u moth /opt/moth/mothd

Permissions

It's up to you not to be a bonehead about permissions.

Install sets it so the web user on your system can write to the files it needs to, but if you're using Apache, it plays games with user IDs when running CGI. You're going to have to figure out how to configure your preferred web server.

Everything Else

If anything is missing in this documentation, create an issue/PR or email somebody.