08 jul

34 weeks pregnant and starting to feel it, yo. Sleepy, achey, swollen… but still got work to do. Let’s do it!

intranet

Since I got the repo deployment issue figured out on Friday, I can dedicate today to working on the intranet dev site.

Took me a minute to figure out where the dev blogs are installed, but I found them! Then I realized Jared had recently added a site to the multisite, so I asked him for login info. Once I was in, I added a new site called ‘intranet.’ Now I can install the latest UA theme and make sure nothing blows up.

Had to rename the UA theme. I was thinking through how adding the UA theme as-is to the live server probably won’t work out since there’s an older version of the UA theme already on there. Probably need to rename the child theme, too, since the current one points to the old theme as parent. Maybe I’ll just throw ‘2019’ on the end of it and hope for the best. Anyway, it worked and the theme is up, and we can edit to our hearts’ content.

LDAP

On to the LDAP stuff.

The plugin we use to handle LDAP/auth is set at the network/multisite level and can’t be changed/edited on a site-by-site basis. In theory, it can be installed on each site individually and set up that way, but I’m not sure what that would look like or what issues that would cause.

Options:

• Existing multisite
  • Deactivate network-wide plugin
  • Reactive plugin on individual sites (at least 15) with current LDAP settings
  • Add intranet as new blog and install plugin with active directory settings
• New install of WP elsewhere
  • We wouldn’t have to deal with activating the plugin on multiple sites
  • But we’d have a different WP install we’d need to worry about updating/keeping current

Is there a reason we wouldn’t want to change the multisite version to active directory instead of university-wide LDAP?

Talked to Jen, and we might not want to change all the blogs/sites to AD because some blogs might have users from outside of the library. I cannot image why that would be, but old systems and all that… I suppose I could go through the user list and see who isn’t a library employee, but that sounds tedious.

We agreed that probably the easiest way to continue would be to install WP at intranet.lib.ua.edu on the new server and maintain and separate install. SO. I’m going to install the LDAP plugin on my localhost version the intranet (not on the dev server since that’s already multisite) and see if I can get the active directory stuff working.

ILLiad

I got stuck on ILLiad for a couple hours this afternoon. Danny installed the ILLiad client for me, but as it turns out, all the files I need to change are on the server/backend and the client wasn’t even necessary. I got instructions back from OCLC about editing a macro in Microsoft Word that will help with file permissions, but I highly doubt that will update our server permissions. That would be a very bad security hole, I’d think!

I tried accessing the server via SFTP with the credentials Steven gave me, but to no avail. I can’t figure out why it won’t connect for me.

09 jul

Started the morning by trying to connect the ILLiad server again. No luck. Steven said to leave it until I hear from OCLC, so I’m moving back to the LDAP stuff.

LDAP plugin

Pulled up the local install of WP with the UA theme on it, installed the LDAP plugin, set it up. Immediately got the “this site is experiencing technical difficulties” message from WP, so I definitely messed something up. A new feature with WP 5.2 is they send you an email with the error message and give you a way to access your dashboard via emergency mode, so at least I can see what I screwed up!

Turns out MAMP doesn’t have the apache/php modules needed for LDAP. Great. I tried to figure out how to fix that, but I’ve decided it’s probably not worth it to try to hack a free tool like MAMP. This is what docker is for!

Sidenote: I’m so tired of environments. All I wanted was to test this damn plugin… now I have to go configure a docker container.

Ended up being a bustly kind of day with meetings and things, so I never did get around to figuring out the docker thing. Tomorrow?

10 jul

Started the day off with the LibCal migration from rooms to spaces.

It went pretty well. Checking the URLs, adding friendly URLs, updating website pages, and testing functionality took most of the morning. Only one location is giving us any technical problems, so I think this was pretty successful, overall.

Heard back from OCLC! I had the wrong port for our server. It was pretty simple to get in there, download the logon page, update the HTML, and upload it again.

Spent the rest of the day trying to figure out my stupid docker container. It didn’t go well. I unmounted some volumes that were causing trouble, but that just cascaded into more issues with other volumes, so. I definitely messed things up.

11 jul

Jennifer is done with the first stage of our server migration! Time to start testing!

Going to try to keep notes of my process and definitely keep notes of anything I change/update.

Apps testing

Alert added, updated, and deleted without issue.

I moved on to ER carousel and remembered that I had to add myself as admin to a few of these apps: news, hours, and erCarousel. I believe I’m already in hours, but I’m going to add myself to the others to test them.

Exactly what I did:

• log in to server
• mysql -u cewyatt -p
• enter password
• show databases; to see the exact name of the database
• use webapps_erCarousel;
• show tables; to double check there is an admins table
• select * from admins; to verify I’m not in there
• insert into admins (name) values ('cewyatt');
• select * from admins; to verify I’m in there now

I’ll do the same thing with news and hours. The hours one is different than the other two, but still easy to add to.

Carousel slide added, updated, and deleted without issue. Approved some of the slides that were hanging out in there just to make sure I could do so.

No problem adding, updating, deleting, approving news items.

I’m 100% baffled that the forms app was working when I first pulled up these apps. When I went back to it just now, it was doing the internal server error that I was getting last week, but then I refreshed a few times, and it’s serving those forms. So so confused by the whole thing.

No issues editing from sofware, staff directory, hours/hours management, onesearch, permissions apps. The ‘edit profile’ app works, but the information isn’t actually display anywhere??

timetables

When we were planning this migration, I had thought that the API for room bookings vs spaces might affect our timetables app, and it did! The APIs are similar but just different enough that a simple URL swap is not going to cut it.

I spent about 90 minutes today going through the API and seeing where updates will need to be made to app. It shouldn’t be too bad, I don’t think, but famous last words…

12 jul

Today’s tasks:

• Work with Rudaina on a plan for the intranet
• Timetables app

I’m going to start with the intranet stuff since server migration is priority numero uno rn.

Got lots of research done with the intranet migration today. I’ve never been in the backend of our intranet, but Rudaina hooked me up. Once I was in there, I realized I did not understand how things were organized, so I took a while and read through the drupal docs. Very helpful! I made myself a little cheatsheet, then went back to our site. I’m still a little baffled about why certain things are set up the way they are, but the good news is that we’re only migrating pieces of this at a time. The pieces we’re starting with are main pages and lists of PDFs/word documents, so those shouldn’t be hard to export/import.

Rudaina and I will meet sometime next week about how to tackle this hydra, but for now I’m feeling pretty good about going from knowing absolutley nothing about this site this morning and more or less having a plan for migration this afternoon. I’ll take that as a win for this Friday!