The school I work at currently uses Moodle as our chosen LMS for students. Moodle is linked with our School Management system to sync courses, assignments and course enrollments among other things. This greatly assists in minimising administration work, but more on this at another time…
Our school also uses Google Apps Education Edition to provide our students with Email accounts and usage of the other Google Apps services. Google provides a great LDAP sync tool that can easily sync users and groups memberships but lacks a way to sync users passwords (not secure). For this to be possible a Single Sign On (SSO) system must come into the equation. These systems can cost thousands of dollars (depending on user numbers) from 3rd party developers or require a large amount of IT admin time and server resources to perfect a solid solution. I searched long and hard for a suitable tool for this job and tried a number of solutions but none worked well enough for my liking.
At the same time that I was searching for solutions for this issue I was also browsing around for some useful Moodle plugins. This is where I came across the Moodle-Google Intergration plugin that would solve all my issues. The plugin provides a SAML based authentication method to allow users to use their LDAP credentials (LDAP must be configured in Moodle) to log into their Google Apps account. This plugin talks with the SSO feature built into Google Apps via SAML 2.0 post and the use of the generated keys and certificates for security. Users then login to Moodle and from there can access their Google Apps account.
More to come on the configuration of this plugin. Stay tuned…
Recently our OS X Server crashed and burned. A Mac tech. and I tried put our heads together and attempted to bring the system back life and restore its previous state. The file system and user data was all intact however, we could not consistently keep the network services (AFP, Open Directory, etc.) running. We even went as far as trying a complete rebuild on an alternative XServe then restoring the OD and Directory Services settings but this was also to no avail. Let me give you some background as to how our Mac network WAS setup;
We are primarily a Windows based domain. The only pocket of Macs we have are for our Photography and Visual Arts departments (and an odd Mac Book here and there). The original setup was conceived well before my time at my current company so up until I was thrown into the guts of the Mac network when the whole system went down my knowledge of the server setup was on a need to know basis. The XServe had a Directory Services LDAP connection to our Windows 2003 LDAP server and had a custom binding to pull user information from Active Directory. I never completely explored the custom mappings but from what I have been told it was a fairly intense setup to provide the out of the ordinary needs at the time.
This is my first job where I have had to support Macs so my knowledge was very limited but from the start I found the setup to be somewhat odd. The Macs would always take a considerable amount of time to startup (which I worked out later was due to Directory Services taking an age to authenticate), user accounts would randomly stop working or be denied access to applications. The main method behind the madness was to allow users to maintain their Windows based home folders, but also have a network mapped home folder on the Mac server when logged into a Mac computer. I had always wanted to reconfigure the server myself but without the necessary time or expertise I stopped myself from opening that can of worms. But with the server now down for the count I was forced to commission my plan…
More blabbering to come….
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