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 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).

FlyingFish was deprecated in the Faculty at the beginning of Semester 2, 2006, although remains in existence to overcome some of the more obvious deficiencies in WebCT 6, a system considered by many to be even more painful to use.

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.)