Anyone setup Facilty Eportal Ex Access

[jammers]

I’m hoping there are a few schools who have gone through this process already and could give me some advice.

I'm partly through trying to setup Facility Eportal access externally for parents to use over the internet. I have setup IIS, all is working fine within school.

We host our webpage and get our internet connection from county. So i need to fill in a change request form to see if they will allow us to do this.

Am i right in thinking I will need them to map – eportal.myschool.lincs.sch.uk through to our internal address 192.168.x.x on port 8080 (or 8443 if they want us to go secure).

Is this the way you guy's have gone about it????

Thanks in Advance

[BaccyNet]

I believe this is how ours is setup but then again our changes were made as a bundle with other schools having the same change made. As for secure, I dont believe you need it (we certainly dont have it) if you do, you would want port 443.

Hope this helps!

[powdarrmonkey]

If you have non-standard ports mapped, your clients will need to specify them in their request. Only the default ports 80 and 443 don't need to be explicit. Your providers might be able to translate them though if 8080 and 8443 are a requirement.

[jammers]

I'll fill the change request form and try to get county to map eportal.myschool.lincs.sch.uk on port to 192.168.x.x:8080

Thanks for your help, i hate filling these things in

(Oh on further research i think 8443 is the internal secure tomcat port)

[michael2k6]

@ jammers

8080 is the default internal tomcat port, 8443 the default secure. If you point eportal.myschool.mycounty.sch.uk at 192.xx.xx.xx:8080 or 192.xx.xx.xx:8443 you will be using tomcat to host your external pages. There is nothing wrong with doing that, but most people do use IIS which would save the need for the ports adding.

Michael Sanderson
Technical Engineer
Serco Learning

[maniac]

At my last school I served E-Portal out to the internet through an apache reverse proxy, which was secure to the end user, and on the normal 8080 port from the reverse proxy server to E-portal its self. this worked well, and also meant our e-portal server wasn't directly exposed to the outside world, and I could also serve out other applications on different servers through the same reverse proxy, which cut down on the number of ports that we had directed into the school network. Worked like a charm! It also meant I could pull the plug on all external services very easily if we suspected there was a breach of security or simelar.

In the end we had E-Portal, Outlook web access and Moodle all served to the outside world through the same server by the time I left.

Mike.

[monkeyx]

We are in the process of switching to ssl explorer.

I have been very impressed by services offered by this free tool, which I discovered via edugeek researching a similar issue to you. Allows integration with AD, tunnelling reverse proxying, application launching ie RDP, VNC etc. They even sell low costs certficates.

It looks like company that produced it, no longer offers official support. But all necessary downloads are still on Sourceforge.

I have had best success installing with 1.5 version of Sun JDK, it will install via 1.6 but it is not a clean install (especially on Linux). Also runs on Windows, and AD integration worked better for me on Windows install.

[maniac]

3SP, who produce SSL explorer no longer update the 'community' edition as it's called, I think they had too many problems with people using their code for commercial gain, so they've now gone commercial themselves, and have recently re-launched their website removing all traces of the previous free product

You can buy an 'enterprise license' from them to use the latest version, but I expect their pricing has sky-rocketed since I last looked (you have to register on their website to get prices now )

Another brilliant opensource product gone commercial, shame!

Mike.

[monkeyx]

There is still a version hereSourceForge.net: SSL-Explorer

I am now getting closer to going live with this version and I am very impressed still. Getting hang of producing modules/editing modules etc.

I am tempted to get this project going again and get a new web site running for it. It looks like it would not be too difficult to create a public store for holding modules etc, rather than pointing back at 3sp site.

It could also do with being updated to latest jdk version etc etc.

I am c# programmer than java, but lookng at some of the code I seem to be able to make sense of most of it. But even if I just mainted current version and added extra modules it would still be a great program.

Anyone interested in helping me with this? If so guess we will need a new thread too

monkeyx