Workshop meeting, Belgrade February 18, 2015

Meeting was held regarding the User management, authentication and authorization in the BAEKTEL network of nodes. In the previous meetings it was proposed that Marko Živković leads the team of IT experts that are project members in order to develop system procedures and architecture that could support user management for learners and staff.

The concept of SAML and Signe Sing-On was explored. All users, according to the SSO idea, would be able to login at any of the nodes, and carry the session with their browser – be logged in at all the places. This method required the system to have concept of SP (Service Provider) – which in our case would be EDX and Resoruce Space, and idP (Identity provider) which the current system does not have. Team from University of Niš explored further devolpment. They introduced additional servers which would support Shibboleth and LDAP – which in this case would represent the idP. The complete test bed of nodes was introduced – 3 EDX servers, idP server – centos with openldap, shibboleth, 1 Resouce Space server. After 6 days of testing – University of Niš came to conclusion that this solution was not completely supported by edx and resource space. Everything was still in beta, and produced a lot of bugs. Cause of the lack of the resoruces to further examine the bugs, Marko Živković introduced this results to the meeting attendees.

Prof.dr Ranka Stanković acknowledged the effort and suggested a new solution. She proposed that we should skip the Single Sign-on, and concentrate on the possibility for the user to keep the same user/password combination at all nodes since the session would be needed in just a few special cases. The rest of the meeting attendees agreed. Nikola Vulović proposed few solutions which we all agreed to further explore. The idea was find the tables from the user databases at the nodes which should be synced. After - that concept should be tested. It was agreed that in the upcoming weeks team would explore the idea and propose a meeting date for the meeting in Niš – where Nikola Vulović, Dalibor Vorkapić and Marko Živković could prove the concept and define the direction of the development.