Mar 3

Today: 03-Mar-2009: Oracle, ePrints and Moodle

Category: today

This morning we had a presentation on the Oracle IDM system. The ‘IDM’ is comprised of OIM (Oracle Internet Manager?) which pushes (at least in this system) information into the OID (Oracle Internet Directory; a directory which exposes an LDAPv3 interface). The system has a rather hackish, ugly user edit screen, generic technology converter, limited AD integration (push only, no pull) and the system appears to have limitations on its fields, for example it can’t hide fields on new user screen as opposed to the edit screen. Bummer. They’re purchasing another product to handle password changes from Active Directory but thats rather weird. Coming from an environment with Novell, it seems strange that it can’t handle it but anyway the University has bought all of the Oracle junk and now it’ll be time to put it back together. The team I work in (Learning and Teaching within Application Support and Development) has the sneaking suspicion it will come back to us, either our group specifically (L&T) or our parent group (AS&D). Either way we’re not looking forward to getting the mess.

Today also revealed a queer ePrints security problem. One of my deployment scripts failed to reset the security on the external site which caused the system to be inaccessible externally. The change was made on Friday morning so it took until this morning (thats 4 days later) to detect the issue. The question was asked how much attention is really paid to the system, but thats neither here nor there. I fixed up my mistake and reran the server configuration scripts and it was all back and running. Whilst I was working around with it I found some large ePrints log files – over 2.7GB of log files in the archives going all the way back to 2007 and none of them compressed. Having a chat with people we’re probably going to burn them off for reference and reclaim a bit of space.

We had some Moodle fun with one of my issues appearing to be a mysterious self fixing problem (could do with more of those). We’ve had other changes that impacted on that area in part so perhaps that fixed it. There was also a Moodle migration today and I believe one of my changes are now in production – already I’m leaving my mark on the systems!

Last but not least, the Adobe Presenter is broken after just two days of semester. In those two days however its managed to generate 400MB of data. This happened late on the day so the rest of the week will be taken up fixing up this stuff as well as shifting data when we get a larger disk to store the presenter stuff.

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