10 September 2010, 8:56

Any hints, tips or nightmare before I attempt to connect another moodle to our one mahara (1.3)

One concern is that the same tutors will be logging from either moodle (undergrad and professional courses builds) - any chance of a conflict? They will be using the same login userID, but will obviously have different moodle database ids.

We have 1.9.9 moodle <> mahara 1.3 working fine on live and want to add another moodle 1.9.9

Cheers
Roger

15 September 2010, 4:35

Hi Roger,

We run with ~110 Moodles connecting to the same Mahara. In our setup, each Moodle has it's own institution in Mahara but this isn't necessary. Obviously, you need to consider whether you want to have multiple institutions, or one institution. The walled garden possibilities for preventing institution users from interacting with one another may sway you - these features should be integrated in to 1.4 in the near future.

As you suggest, you will hit an issue if you have tutors with accounts in both your undergrad and professional Moodles. I'm afraid that there's little that you can do about this though.

In Mahara, each user has both an authentication instance (e.g. XMLRPC for moodle A) and a username at that auth instance (e.g. myusername). If they come in from moodle B, even with the same username, they won't have the same auth instance, and so a new user would be created.

I believe that Catalyst did some specific work for a similar situation but it's not advisable to use unless you really need to. The following apply:

1. it requires all users from all sources have unique usernames - the same username used in two sources would allow both users to log in to Mahara with the same username;
2. registration on your mahara site will be disabled; and
3. registration on your moodle sites should be disabled to prevent against account theft.

                // When turned on, this setting means that it doesn't matter 
                // which other application the user SSOs from, they will be 
                // given the same account in Mahara.
                //
                // This setting is one that has security implications unless 
                // only turned on by people who know what they're doing. In 
                // particular, every system linked to Mahara should be making 
                // sure that same username == same person.  This happens for 
                // example if two Moodles are using the same LDAP server for 
                // authentication.
                //
                // If this setting is on, it must NOT be possible to self 
                // register on the site for ANY institution - otherwise users 
                // could simply pick usernames of people's accounts they wished 
                // to steal.

17 September 2010, 4:58

Thanks for all this info.

I need to go away and discuss this with the stake holders and see which option we want to take before implimenting.

I think we'll be OK securitywise as the only way into mahara if via moodle SSO and there is no option to self register on moodle or mahara so we meet those three critrea.

Roger