[LON-CAPA-admin] Cloning production server for testing purposes

[Stefan Bisitz]

On 06.07.2011 17:32 CEST, Lucas, Mark wrote:
> Stefan,
>
> I'm not sure localenroll.pm will do what you think. It's for the auto
> enrollment process, isn't
> it? Or is there a routine in there that filters logins?

It's used for configuring local authentication, e.g. LDAP what we use 
here. A customized subroutine retrieves user name and password of the 
one you tries to login and then connects to the local authentication 
system to check if this data is valid. It returns success/no success 
depending on the result.

This could be changed to
if ($username ne "bisitzspecialsuperuser") {
    return ...
}


> Under system configuration you can redirect logins to a different
> machine except for from certain IP addresses.
 > The only hitch I realized is that as far as I can tell, it
> has to be another machine in
> the cluster, which is hard to do when it's out of the cluster.

I will check this.

> The nice thing is that the emails are showing up within a few minutes of
> going out. Thank you,
> Stuart, for updating mailman!

I guess our local greylist sometimes forgets about known senders and 
delays it or something like that.

Stefan

>
> Mark
>
>
> On Jul 6, 2011, at 11:19 AM, Stefan Bisitz wrote:
>
>> Thanks, Mark. This is helpful.
>>
>> To assure that no others than the tester personnel can login, I think I
>> will adjust localenroll.pm.
>>
>> By the way: Funny to find your answer in my inbox before the actual
>> question... :-)
>>
>> Stefan
>>
>>
>> On 06.07.2011 16:28 CEST, Lucas, Mark wrote:
>>> We have a development server that has the hostname oucapa2 and domain
>>> ohiou,
>>> the same as our main library server.
>>>
>>> Since it is in the development cluster, none of the machines in the
>>> production cluster
>>> know of it's existence. It does not interfere or confuse the production
>>> cluster.
>>>
>>> It has a different IP address than the regular library server and
>>> different hosts.tab and domain.tab.
>>>
>>> The only real risk is that a student somehow gets logged into the wrong
>>> machine by
>>> somehow getting the IP address of the development server (not a high
>>> risk in my mind).
>>>
>>> At the last meeting we were actually talking about setting up a small
>>> cluster in between
>>> development and production, which cloned the full library servers at
>>> several of the institutions.
>>> This would provide a close-to-production environment for LC 3.0 testing.
>>>
>>> Hope this helps!
>>>
>>> Mark
>>>
>>> On Jul 6, 2011, at 10:02 AM, Stefan Bisitz wrote:
>>>
>>>> [06.07.2011 16:02 CEST]
>>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> To avoid chaos, I want to make sure that my idea works.
>>>>
>>>> I'd like to clone one of our production servers for testing purposes. I
>>>> do not need connection to the LON-CAPA cluster but I want to have all
>>>> local users, problems and courses as well as the related data.
>>>>
>>>> Is it really okay to "copy" the whole server, configure it as
>>>> "standalone" and connect it to the internet? Copy means to process most
>>>> of the steps as described on http://loncapa.org/hardwareupgrade.html
>>>> which is basically copying the home folder.
>>>>
>>>> Even not connecting it to the internet could mean to have two very
>>>> similar servers in the same local network, e.g. domain and host id would
>>>> be the same.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks in advance for sharing any doubts,
>>>> Stefan Bisitz
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> <mailto:LON-CAPA-admin at mail.lon-capa.org>
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>>>
>>> --
>>> Mark Lucasemail: lucasm at ohiou.edu <mailto:lucasm at ohiou.edu>
>>> <mailto:lucasm at ohiou.edu>
>>> 252D Clippinger Labphone: (740)597-2984
>>> Department of Physics and Astronomyfax: (740)593-0433
>>> Ohio University
>>> Athens, OH 45701
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
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>
> --
> Mark Lucasemail: lucasm at ohiou.edu <mailto:lucasm at ohiou.edu>
> 252D Clippinger Labphone: (740)597-2984
> Department of Physics and Astronomyfax: (740)593-0433
> Ohio University
> Athens, OH 45701
>
>
>
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