brudinie

pete - you are correct, its not the best. That's why I've replaced it with an implementation of AES in the latest Moodle 2 version ;-)

Hi Marci I have no objections to them being hosted here - many thanks for your work on them. I had already done work on both of these plugins but just hadn't released them yet. Please let me know if you have any fixes in future and then it saves us both from re-inventing the wheel! I think you have my email address but if not you can find my contact details on Citricity Ltd 2011 If you can send me your email address I'll try to keep you up to date with any work I do on the plugins. BTW - it turns out that the windows share web client white space issue with folders and files is an issue with people running the block on a Moodle hosted on a windows server. Linux / BSD servers should not have been affected by the white space issue. I have fixed this in the latest releases. The "official" versions are available for download from: Citricity Ltd 2011 Citricity Ltd 2011 Both these plugins have been successfully tested on a linux install in a college today.

I need to clarify this post: Overnet data do not sell directly to schools - if you want their solution (which is excellent in my opinion), then you will have to purchase it via Web Anywhere who are also an excellent company with plenty of Moodle knowledge and experience.

Excellent point!

I set up Ossett School's Moodle VLE using Fedora Core Linux. IF YOU WANT TO DO IT YOURSELF: Its relatively easy to do providing you don't take all your Windows knowledge for granted and expect Linux to work just the same. Also, you need to understand that Linux is only secure if you use it correctly. This means you need to invest a bit of time learning about file system security - i.e. make sure your web readable folders are not all set to 777 permissions, etc. Besides that, Linux works great (better than windows in my opinion). I've had near 1 year uninterupted uptime with Linux servers. Windows is apparently a lot better than it used to be for hosting php and mysql these days - especially now that there is a php fast-cgi module available for ISA servers. IF YOU WANT SOMEONE ELSE TO DO IT I work with a company called Overnet data (I'm not an employee). If you want them to put a Moodle server into your school they can give you a very advanced linux set up. The entire linux stack is compiled from the ground up with only the components necessary to make Moodle and the necessary plugins work. This means the threat window is especially low and the performance is high. You can also buy this service from Web Anywhere in Keighley who offer the same solution but with adittional support. Alternatively, if you want an off the shelf distribution of Linux running Moodle I could look at assisting you with this as I have done it before. I can also talk to you about Moodle integration with SIMS if that is something you are interested in. My email address (obfuscated to stop web crawlers) is: b~r~u~d~i~n~i~e~@~g~m~a~i~l~.~c~o~m (simply remove the tilde characters in the above to get my email) Personally I think that putting a Moodle into your school is better than hosting it on the "cloud". If you connect to the internet via your LA/Regional Broadband Consortium you will probably be well aware of the (un)relaibility of such services. When I worked at Ossett school there were plenty of times that the internet went down and because we hosted Moodle ourselves everyone could continue to use it. Also, we were able to provide students and teachers with remote access to network shares via Moodle by using the "windows share web client" block for Moodle.

probably a good thing as there are some fundamental issues with the db - e.g related data stored in single fields in same table - probably an optimization based on the fact Facilty can run on an access db!

I don't like the idea either - mosts schools access there internet via their RBC and you are not going to get 9.9999% uptime guaranteed with your LA or RBC.

Its not unfortunate that I'm no longer mainting the Facility to Moodle block for Moodle as I have passed it on to another very capable developer

I (Guy Thomas) will hopefully be creating a Progresso interface to Moodle. I'm just in the process of contacting Serco for some advice.

If anyone is interested in a commercial option with all API calls approved by Capita (I.e. it will NOT void your end user licence), I recommend you check out: School Anywhere Moodle Personalised Learning Platform VLE for Schools - Moodle Hosting, Support and Training

I created this block to work with LDAP but I've only ever been able to test it with Active Directory. Recently, someone contacted me with a similar problem and it was because they were using open LDAP. The home directory field is different to that of Active Directory. The latest version of the block has a config variable that you can set to tell it to use a different field in Active Directory to retrieve the home directory. http://www.ossett.wakefield.sch.uk/web/media/files/moodlegpl/head/smb_web_client.zip Cheers Guy

I've only just noticed this post, so sorry for the delay. You could be having trouble with the queries because it seems your idnumbers aren't zero prefixed. If the are zero prefixed in Facility - e.g. 001234 then that's exactly how they have to be in the active directory description field. If you can't fix them in the active directory description field, I could modify the block to allow a padding string to be used- this would automatically insert the 0 prefixes before it does the lookups - the queries should then work.

I've modified my latest 'development' version to allow for ssl. To enable https you add the following config variable: $smb_cfg->cfgssl=true; You can download the latest development version from: http://www.ossett.wakefield.sch.uk/web/media/files/moodlegpl/head/smb_web_client.zip If anyone could test this for me and give me some feedback, that would be great. Thanks in advance Brudinie (Guy)

I'm the author of windows share web client. We use the ldapcapture auth plugin to pass the credentials on to the windows share web client block. This means that you can have a https login for your site and then not have to worry about the credentials being sent cleartext over http later. The credentials are fed through to smbclient at the OS level so they never touch http. This is the recommended method.

Its usually because of the following 1) You haven't renamed your config file by removing the 'dist' component from the filename. 2) You have errors in your config file. Hope this helps.