[LON-CAPA-admin] Loncapa Captcha

[Stuart Raeburn]

Hi Balagopal,

By default, no Captcha is included in the "Contact Helpdesk" web form  
(unauthenticated access) linked to from the log-in page.

A domain coordinator would use: Main Menu > Set domain configuration >  
Display ("Log-in page options" checked), then check the "original  
(CAPTCHA)" radio button in the "Contact helpdesk" CAPTCHA validation  
row and push "Save Changes" to set the public-facing helpdesk to use  
Authen::Captcha.

I tested this on VMs running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (both 32 and 64 bit) and  
found that Captcha was working correctly, with files written to the  
captchadb and captchaspool directories when I displayed the helpdesk  
web form.  When the form was submitted, the Captcha was validated as  
expected.

A plain text display of your domain's configuration is available via:
/cgi-bin/listdomconfig.pl.  A domain coordinator can display that URL,  
when logged in, with the DC role selected.  Look for the captcha item  
within the "login = $VAR1 = { }" data structure.  You can also check  
what has been cached in memcache by running:

/home/httpd/perl/debug/memcached_dump.pl |grep'login.captcha'

from the command line.

On Ubuntu 16.04 LTS:

sudo dpkg-query -s libauthen-captcha-perl

reports:

Version: 1.024-1
Depends: perl, libgd-perl | libgd-gd2-noxpm-perl | libgd-gd2-perl,  
libstring-random-perl

You might check that the libgd-perl and libstring-random-perl packages  
are present.

The version of libauthen-captcha-perl on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is 1.023-6.


Stuart Raeburn
LON-CAPA Academic Consortium

Quoting Balagopal Pillai <Balagopal.Pillai at Dal.Ca>:

> Hi,
>
>          I upgraded Loncapa version to 2.11.2 and Ubuntu to 16.04  
> today. Everything works fine
>          except the captcha on help desk link. I tested it by  
> upgrading the dev vm to  2.11.2 and leaving
>          ubuntu there to 14.04. Captcha worked fine there. I checked  
> the permissions for captchadb
>          and captchaspool directories and they are both owned by  
> apache user. The captcha perl packages
>          are present on both vms. The only difference is OS version.  
> I was wondering if there is something
>          I am overlooking here. Thanks a lot.
>
>
>
> Regards
>
> Balagopal Pillai
> Room 004, Chase Building
> Department of Mathematics and Statistics
>>
> Dalhousie University
> Halifax, NS
> (902) 494-3204