Category Archives: Tech Articles

iSAMS to Moodle Course Enrolment – Part 3

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This is the third post about setting up iSAMS and Moodle to perform course and user enrolment synchronisation. Here are links to the other sections:

  1. Prerequisites and Assumptions
  2. Part 1 – Setting up your MSSQL Server
  3. Part 2 – Setting up your Apache / PHP server
  4. Part 3 – Setting up Moodle

Set up Moodle to read our iSAMS Data

So now we have a LAMP server configured ready for Moodle which can also read our MSSQL database with all the course enrolment data we are copying over from iSAMS; it is time to get Moodle configured.

Continue reading iSAMS to Moodle Course Enrolment – Part 3 →

iSAMS to Moodle Course Enrolment – Part 2

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This is the second post about setting up iSAMS and Moodle to perform course and user course enrolment synchronisation. Here are links to the other sections:

  1. Prerequisites and Assumptions
  2. Part 1 – Setting up your MSSQL Server
  3. Part 2 – Set up Apache to connect to MS SQL Server
  4. Part 3 – Setting up Moodle

Set up Apache to connect to MS SQL Server

We now need to configure our LAMP / Moodle server to be able to talk to MSSQL so that we can retrieve the data we prepared in our new database in the previous post. Again you will need to have already set up your LAMP / Moodle server by this point. Please either set it up as per the official Moodle documentation or as per my previous post; then come back here.

Continue reading iSAMS to Moodle Course Enrolment – Part 2 →

iSAMS to Moodle Course Enrolment – Part 1

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I have begun looking at using Moodle at my school and how we can integrate it into our existing databases so to remove as much administrative burden as possible. I have used Moodle on and off for many years now and one of the first things I always do is set it up to use LDAP Authentication for its log-ons. This makes it really easy to allow users to use their Active Directory log-ons to access your Moodle install. I will not go in to details of that here as it is already well documented over on the Moodle Docs site.

However, one thing that had always proved harder for me with Moodle was the integration of course / class enrolments with the MIS that the school was using. Previously that has normally been Capita SIMS. Capita’s licensing meant I was not allowed to play around in the database back-end of that system to try and create a streamlined process. My current school however uses iSAMS for its MIS system and with this system all custom reporting is done through Microsoft’s SSRS. The upshot of this is that you have full access to the MSSQL database back-end of your MIS and you can begin to manipulate the data using the tools that Microsoft provide you with MSSQL. With this in mind I began looking at the Moodle External Database Enrolment Module to see if we could get a live link between our Moodle install and the course enrolment data already being held and maintained in our school MIS, iSAMS.
Continue reading iSAMS to Moodle Course Enrolment – Part 1 →

Installing a Ubuntu Server for Moodle

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I have written this post, not as a replacement for the very good documentation that is available over on the Moodle Docs site, but as a way for myself to refer back to the process I carry out when installing Moodle.

I am using Ubuntu Server 14.04 for my operating system, so these steps will specific to that distribution. They may well translate into Debian without any editing but I have not tested that. If you are using a different operating system then your steps will vary somewhat.

The reason for choosing Ubuntu 14.04 for my OS is not only that it is the latest LTS version of Ubuntu, but also that it comes with PHP version 5.5.9 in it’s package repository. Ubuntu 12.04 only comes with PHP version 5.3.10. In PHP version 5.4 support for LDAP Paged results was introduced which means that if you have more than 1000 users in any of your MS AD LDAP containers PHP will be able to retrieve them all.

Set up your LAMP Server ready for Moodle

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Nagios Speedtest plugin

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*** UPDATE ***

All the code for this plugin is now hosted over on GitHub: https://github.com/jonwitts/nagios-speedtest.

*** UPDATE ***

Version 1.2 is now available. You can now specify a Speedtest Mini Server to check against. If you are updating to this version you will need to change your Nagios check commands to include the new “l” argument to define if you are checking against an internal (Mini) or external Speedtest server. Download links both here and on Nagios Exchange are updated to the new version.

*** EDIT ***

Version 1.1 of the script is now released with some improvements suggested by Sigurdur Bjarnason via email. The download link below is updated to point to the new version and the version on Nagios plugins is updated too.

The main change is that you now need to define the location of the speedtest binary in the script before it will run, and you must now also pass the Server ID of the Speedtest server you want to check against in the command. See the usage of the script for more details.

*** ***

This week we were trying to download some files from work and the download speed was slow to say the least. I then made a SSH connection to my PC at home and downloaded them from there and then copied the files back to work with WinSCP; all of this quicker than downloading directly at work!

This lead us to wondering if there was a Linux utility for testing Internet upload and download speed on the CLI. A quick Google search later lead us to: https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli . The developers of the small Python utility describe it quite simply as: “Command line interface for testing internet bandwidth using speedtest.net”

I installed this on both my home PC and our Nagios server at work and begun to play around with what we could do with it. I have long thought that it would be nice to be able to monitor and graph the upload and download speed of our connection so that we can spot trends as to when we are getting Internet slow-downs. To date I had not found a Nagios plugin which would do what I wanted, but this little CLI tool could quite easily be manipulated to my own ends!

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Bring Your Own Device – A Technical Perspective – Part 2

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So after having implemented our BYOD network as described in this post… I began thinking about how it would be great if we could remove the Microsoft RADIUS server from the equation and have Smoothwall perform the RADIUS AAA. This would enable Smoothwall to know the user that was connected simply by the account they authenticated with against RADIUS; as opposed to having to log into the Smoothwall again through a web page using the same credentials you just passed to RADIUS to get on the WiFi in the first place!

Then back in May 2013 Smoothwall released Main Update 60 which in essence turned the Smoothwall device into a RADIUS server. Perfect! Just what I had wanted.

So I began to play around with the Smoothwall RADIUS offering and our Netgear Managed WiFi set up.

Continue reading Bring Your Own Device – A Technical Perspective – Part 2 →

Nagios HP MSA P2000 Status and Performance Monitor – Part 2

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In an earlier post I wrote about the tweaks I made to Thomas Weaver’s Nagios script for monitoring our HP P2000 SAN. I am pleased to say that Thomas has incorporated these tweaks into his version of the script which is available for download on his site here.

As I have documented our new VMware Cluster and HP SAN further I have begun to realise that we needed to monitor things on the SAN in a slightly more granular way than this script was allowing us. First off, here is my first attempt at a network diagram of the whole VMware cluster:

vmWare Cluster Network Diagram

 

Continue reading Nagios HP MSA P2000 Status and Performance Monitor – Part 2 →

Nagios HP MSA P2000 Status and Performance Monitor

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We have just finished installing our new HP P2000 SAN ready for the implementation of our VMWare set up next week and thought we should set up some monitoring other than basic pings for them in Nagios! HP supplied the SNMP MIBs with the SAN, but rather than write new SNMP queries for everything we wanted to monitor, I thought I would search the Nagios Exchange first to see if anyone else had already created such a plugin.

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Bring Your Own Device – A Technical Perspective

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This is a description of how I have set up our Bring Your Device solution at my current school. It makes use of the following hardware and software:

  • Smoothwall UTM1000
  • Netgear WC7520 WiFi Controller
  • Netgear WNDAP360 and WNDAP350 Access Points
  • Netgear GSM7328S v2 L3 Switch
  • Netgear GS724TPS Smart Switch
  • Microsoft Server 2008 R2 NPS RADIUS Server
  • Microsoft Server 2008 R2 DNS and DHCP Servers

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