nexus-exam

nexus-exam

Introduction

• Client program only used during live exams
• Features a GUI that allows students to connect to their exam VM

The purpose of nexus-exam is to be used during live exam sessions. Students are provided with laptops configured to boot on dedicated USB keys. These USB keys feature a minimal Linux system that automatically runs nexus-exam at boot time. If the IT infrastucture allows it, nexus-exam can be run from a dedicated OS image bootable via PXE (wired network).

Below is a screenshot of nexus-exam's graphical interface:

Building nexus-exam

This section about nexus-exam is only here for completeness and should only matter to developers.

For now, the only supported combination of OS and architecture for nexus-exam is Linux/amd64.

nexus-exam requires three environment variables at build time:

• SERVER (server ip and port)
• EXAM_USER
• EXAM_PWD

Here is an example of how to build nexus-exam:

make build SERVER=10.0.2.15:1077 EXAM_USER=my_exam_user EXAM_PWD='my_secret_password'

On the server side, make sure this user has capability EXAM_ATTACH.

Running nexus-exam

Given server, port and credentials are embedded in nexus-exam, running it is simply a matter of executing:

make run

or:

build/nexus-exam

Notes

• nexus-exam authenticates to the server with embedded credentials (set at build time).
• Students only type the VM attach password provided by the teacher. The VM ID is resolved server-side through the route /vms/spicecreds.
• The exam user should have capability EXAM_ATTACH.
• On the client machine, remote-viewer must be installed (typically through package virt-viewer).