25 September 2013, 4:54

We have our production Moodle 2.5.2 "Mahoodled" into a campus institution on our production Mahara 1.7.  I've set up LDAP authentication on our campus institution, so that our campus users can log in directly to Mahara.  And I've set up XML-RPC authentication from our production Moodle as a child process of the LDAP authentication on Mahara, so that users can SSO in from Moodle to Mahara without creating duplicate accounts.

We have a Moodle development server, also 2.5.2, that we'd like to do some Mahoodle testing on.  Unfortunately, we don't have a Mahara 1.7 development server.  

I'm trying to set up XML-RPC authentication for our Moodle dev server, also as a child process of the LDAP authentication, so we can set up SSO from Moodle dev to Mahara production, also without generating duplicate accounts.  When I try to do so however, following exactly the steps I did to set up SSO from Moodle production to Mahara production, I get the following message:

An error occurred while retrieving the public key from the remote server.<br>Please ensure that the Application and WWW root fields are correct and that networking is enabled on the remote host.<br>Error retrieving public key, failed with error code 0: Sorry, but that hostname (0) could not be resolved!

Any suggestions?  I know that networked is enabled on Moodle dev.  I've regenerated the public key.  And I know that Mahara is locating Moodle dev, because if I try an address that is incorrect, I get a different message about not being able to find the host.  So I'm not sure what the difference is  between failing to find the host, vs the failure to resolve the host that I'm getting when I try to set up the SSO.

Thanks.  keith

25 September 2013, 7:51

Hello Keith,

Is your development server behind a proxy or firewall? Maybe a port needs to be opened there in order to let incoming traffic through. It should be port 80. Often development servers are protected...

Cheers

Kristina

25 September 2013, 11:36

The first half of that error message is from Mahara, explaining that there was an error while trying to initiate an XMLRPC connection to Moodle. The second half of it, "Sorry, but that hostname (0) could not be resolved!", is the error string that Moodle sent back to Mahara.

From this, it looks like possibly your Moodle dev server is not able to connect to your Mahara server. MNet requires that both servers have to be able to send and receive HTTP (or HTTPS) requests to and from each other. (They do a sort of handshake where Mahara sends a request to Moodle, and then while processing that request Moodle on the backend sends a request back to Mahara.)

So check that first. Try SSHing to the Moodle server and see if you can access your Mahara server from there using wget or curl, for instance.

Cheers,

Aaron

25 September 2013, 22:53

Sometime we have to face the problem in moodle XML with moodle development Moodle Hosting dev server, also as a child process of the LDAP authentication, so we can set up SSO from Moodle dev to Mahara production, also without generating duplicate accounts. 

26 September 2013, 0:53

Thanks Aaron & Kristina - I was wondering about firewall issues.  Campus tech services is going to set us up a Mahara dev server for testing (so that's a useful outcome from this problem ).  The wget/curl suggestion will be useful to allow us to make sure everyone can talk to each other.  k