Revision 4 as of 2006-01-11 23:37:38

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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.)