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CGenericXSLT channels, parameters, and Local Connection Contexts
I’m a bit strapped for time today, but I did take a quick look at this, to see if it looks doable. In a nutshell.. I’d like to use a local connection context to do legacy authentication and obtain an encr string to pass to various legacy backed services. This would allow me to create…
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Today’s database tweak..
Well, one thing our ongoing uPortal launch has illustrated, is that contrary to popular belief, our Oracle database server does not have unlimited resources. To that end, a lot of my recent efforts have been geared towards making our installation more “database friendly”. The centerpiece of this is the connection pooling we set up on…
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Legacy myUMBC ACLs as PAGS Groups
I think I’ve found a way (two ways, actually) to import program ACLs (from the BRCTL.PROG_USER_XREF SIS table) into uPortal as PAGS groups, so that we can publish uPortal channels with the exact same access lists as the respective areas in the legacy myUMBC. This would be a big win, particularly for an app like…
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Connection pooling crash course
Just spent the whole day tweaking our new uPortal installation and trying to get it to stay up reliably under load. It’s coming along, but not quite there yet. First lesson: Under any kind of load, you must, absolutely must, enable database connection pooling. That’s because if you don’t, it will open enough database connections…
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Big Portal Launch Today..
Today’s the day where we launch our new myUMBC web portal, essentially turning it loose on the unwashed masses and making the world (well, the campus at least) our big, happy beta-test community. As part of this, we’re kindly leaving the old portal around for awhile, because we anticipate stuff will be broken. The new…
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FastCGI Weirdness
Getting some strange behavior from FastCGI regarding signal handling.. Platform is SunOS 5.10 on Intel, Perl 5.8.6, mod_fastcgi version 0.67. Seems like the FastCGI accept routine is somehow blocking the delivery of signals. If I set a handler for SIGTERM, then call FCGI::accept(), the signal is ignored until the accept routine exits (which happens when…
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My Fun Day.
Today was lotsa fun. It started out with the National Student Clearinghouse. I decided to get a “real” development instance going where I could connect to them as a student, demo it to Academic Services, etc. I ended up wrestling with their stupid referrer-based security scheme again. I took my existing clearinghouse script, which was…
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Shedding the Schedule of Classes Page Albatross…
I’m working on redoing UMBC’s Online Schedule of Classes page. The current version is generated by a big, messy Perl script that reads the raw data uploaded from the HP3000, formats it, generates pages for all the individual disciplines, and then generates the top-level page (which contains links for each semester along with links to…
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Fun with the National Student Clearinghouse
Can I just say that I hate configuring passthrough authentication to outsourced sites on remote web servers? Rule 1: The company’s step-by-step setup instructions will not apply to your particular system configuration. Rule 2: It never works the first time. Rule 3: See rule 2. Rule 4: Debugging is impossible, because the error logs are…