02 October 2012, 7:00

Hi,

We recently migrated our Moodle & Mahara to a new server, and imported the old Mahara database and content so that we wouldn't lose all of the existing work. Most existing users are signing into Mahara without a problem, but we're seeing some users unable to sign in directly to Mahara (but via Moodle works).

My guess is that Mahara is looking at the default institution first - but as we imported the users they are in a separate institution. The 'default' is only setup with internal authentication for administrator accounts. LDAP and xmlrpc have been setup for our 'real' institution - but how do we specify that Mahara should check that first and create accounts within that institution by default?

If that isn't the cause I'd welcome any explanation that might help us fix the problem.

Apologies if the solution is posted elsewhere - but I couldn't find it after 40 minutes of searching.

Thanks, Gordon.

02 October 2012, 19:33

Hi Gordon,

Can you please check for an account that can't sign in properly what authentication method is assigned to it? If you have MNet set up plus an additional method so that users can log in via the regular Mahara interface, normally, you have to set that method up as parent authority to MNet for Mahara to know that it's actually just one account: http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.5/site_admin/institutions.html#mnet-xml-rpc-authentication (#6 in the screenshot).

See also Richard's answer in another forum topic: https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=4407#post19577

Cheers

Kristina

03 October 2012, 8:56

Hi Kristina,

We've got ldap setup alongside (and as parent of) xmlrpc - for most users it seems to work fine - but most of our users were shown to login to moodle and then click on the mahara link.  I've checked and the users having problems have the same authentication as those who don't.

In relation to Richard's post a couple of years ago I did get a few cases of users with duplicate accounts when we first started using Mahara as people were sharing links to users who've never logged in before (so when they came back via moodle later they had 2 accounts). As far as I'm able to tell it's not just those who had a duplicate issue that are having a problem - but there are only a few with the issue.

Thanks, Gordon.

11 October 2012, 10:22

Hi,

Following up this issue with a related question.

I'm unable to delete the 'default institution' via Mahara admin GUI in 1.5 - and I've been told there may be complications if we simply copy our 'live' database into the database for the default institution. We only want a single institution to display and interact with, but even the share page 'helpfully' confuses our users by offering both logged-in users and our 'institution' as share with options.

What would happen if I deleted the 'default' database that contains no active user accounts - would Mahara assume that the imported institution was the default (optimistic enquiry) - or would it break?

Has anyone worked out a process to migrate an existing database on one server into the default institution on another server without ending up with two institutions? I'm sure we can't be the only ones to be facing this issue.

Thanks, Gordon.

22 October 2012, 2:31

Hello Gordon,

Sorry for the late reply. Mahara 1.6 and other things kept me a bit busy.

I do not see a problem for you putting all your users into the default institution on Mahara. You cannot delete "No institution" because it is pretty much the site level, but you can rename it and then have all your users in there along with their authentication method set up for that institution. I think it might be a bit tricky since you have Moodle set up in the other institution and you can only connect Moodle to Mahara once. Best to trial the work flow on a test server first and put the site into Maintenance mode while you transfer everything so that users don't log in.

You would have to remove your users from your institution first. They will receive a notification about that together with their internal user credentials (best tell them to ignore this as you will be hooking them up with LDAP and MNet again). Then you can set up MNet and LDAP for "No institution" and change the authentication method for your users in bulk. See http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.5/site_admin/users.html#new15-user-bulk-actions You will have to check if the remote username is still stored in the database. If not, please follow the work flow at http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.5/site_admin/users.html#new15-change-the-authentication-method-and-remote-username-in-bulk

Please note that you are not moving student portfolio around, but only their authentication method and their belongingness to an institution. Therefore, everything should be doable on the front end.

Cheers

Kristina

26 October 2012, 9:21

Hi Kristina,

Many thanks for the feedback. Things have been a bit manic firefighting over the past couple of weeks, but I'm now in a position to deal with tidying this up!

Thanks, Gordon.

27 October 2012, 18:59

Hello Gordon,

Good luck. I hope everything works out well.

Cheers

Kristina