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August 21, 2006

Blog Downtime - Tuesday Aug. 22 10-11 am

Update: This work has been completed.

For most of the hour you will continue to be able to read blogs, but you will not be able to login or make changes.

The purpose of this downtime is to move blogs.usask.ca to a newer, faster web server and to allow us to use CAS authentication for blogs.

CAS stands for Central Authentication Service. CAS was originally developed at Yale University and is now used in many other places as well.

With CAS, you login once and then have access to multiple services. In future, CAS will make it easier for us to hook additional services into PAWS.

At the moment we are using CAS on our test Wiki server (wiki.usask.ca). Once we turn on CAS authentication for blogs, you will be able to move from blogs to wikis without re-entering your password (and vice versa). As we expand CAS authentication to other areas, it will reduce the number of times you have to type in your username and password each day.

Posted by elf123 at August 21, 2006 04:46 PM     Topic(s):

Comments

From what I can tell you are using MoveableType as your blog system. I was wondering how you went about CASifying it. I am currently looking at doing the samething for the company that I work at. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Pete

Posted by: Peter Giesin at August 23, 2006 12:08 PM

Pete,

I made a few code changes to the Movable Type App.pm and Author.pm modules to support Apache web server authentication. Now, when people login, Apache sets the REMOTE_USER environment variable. Movable Type checks to see if REMOTE_USER is set, and if it is, it lets you in without checking your password.

Then I installed the mod_cas Apache module from Case Western University. Several other versions of this module exist, and depending on the version of CAS you use, you may find one of the others works better for you.

Posted by: Earl Fogel [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 23, 2006 12:52 PM