FlyingFish is the FacMedDent Internet curriculum delivery system, based on Jellyfish (see also ["Mallard"]). It was developed by KevinJudd and ProfessorStone from the School of Mathematics, and sold to half-a-dozen installations which are still online.

It runs on a Windows platform as a GUI-based server. It tends to be extremely unreliable under load, occasionally forgets that files exist, and has benefited from few developments in Web-serving technology since about 2000.

Careful use of Google's Internet caching mechanism has turned up a copy of [http://zanchey.ucc.asn.au/pub/flyingfish-docs.pdf the FlyingFish manual], which is entertaining to read.

In FacMedDent

Each discipline (Medicine, Dentistry, Podiatry) has its own FlyingFish instance, and there is some evil hackery which allows a degree of collusion between the Med and Dent instances. There are also special-purpose instances set up for things like on-line supervised assessments (usually firewalled to the subnet of the MCL or wherever the test is being taken).

Security

There are several known security and pseudo-security issues in FlyingFish, although none are exploitable as an anonymous user.

For example, issuing a bogus URL with ?CMD=Forum tacked on to the end will allow you to visit a bogus forum (whose name can be controlled by the URL submitted). Posting a message to this forum will result in it showing up on everyone's forum changes page. (Several people had their forum access revoked in mid-2005 for creating what The Powers That Be referred to as rogue fora. The term soon mutated to become slang for certain female genital infections.)

Jellyfish

[#Jellyfish Jellyfish] can also deliver Java applets. At one point some students studying ["IntroductionToMechanicsAMEC1001"] (well, E101) discovered that one could press ? and enter and the answer would be revealed. This feature was originally intended for tutors to use, as they could bring up a ? button on the interface somehow, but it functioned by the input field instead of making a direct call. This has now been fixed.

Additionally, since it's client-side Java it's not too hard to disassemble it to reveal the algorithm used to generate the problem, which is often sufficient information to work out the answer.