IOI submission tool

Theory of operation

By default, contestants submit their solutions using the CMS web interface. Alternatively, they can use the ioisubmit command provided by this package. This command tries to submit the solution to CMS first and if it fails, the submit is kept locally and moved to CMS after the end of the contest.

The ioisubmit command is typically called via wrapper scripts provided in task packages (see examples/*). These scripts provide the task name, so the contestants have to specify only the source file(s).

All submissions (regardless whether they made it to the CMS or not) are recorded in the local storage directory (see below) in ZIP files named YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS-microsec:task.status, where status is one of:

• cmsok if accepted by CMS
• cmsrej if rejected by CMS
• local if recorded locally after CMS failure
• .status can be missing if ioisubmit is still running

All actions are logged to the system log, including SHA2-256 hashes of the stored ZIP files. It is recommended to set up remote logging, so that if CMS fails, but the network is up, local submissions will be attested to by the remote log, including trustworthy timestamps.

When the contest is over, all local storage directories are scanned and submissions recorded locally are added to the CMS in order of their increasing timestamps.

Setup

Edit CMS_URL, LOCAL_STORAGE, and LANGUAGE_EXTENSIONS in ioisubmit and admin-submit.

Create local storage directories on contestants' machines, preferably owned by the contestant user with permissions 700.

Set up both local and remote syslog. Remote syslog should record messages from each machine in a separate file.

Collecting local submissions

After the contest is over, you need to download local submissions and log files. Create a directory submissions with a sub-directory for each contestant, named after the contestant's login name (possibly with a otherwise ignored suffix "_anything". The sub-directory should contain:

• local-syslog (local syslog from the contestant's machine)
• remote-syslog (remote syslog from the contestant's machine)
• local-storage (the local storage directory from the contestant's machine)

See the ./download-all script for an example.

Then run ./process-submissions, which produces a log file (to stderr) and a script (to stdout) that sends submissions to CMS using ./admin-submit. The CWS_ADMIN_TOKEN environment variable must be set to contest_admin_token from the CMS configuration file.

Caveats

Works only with IP-based logins to CMS.