Yesterday was the most intense day of work I've had here at CSUN, bar none. This was a good thing.

We got the new version of WebCT, with a test license. WebCT is one of the major courseware systems we use, and (after downloading 137MB file) I got to install it on our Unix server, configure it, and make it do somethings that we need it to do that it doesn't normally do.

This new version of WebCT allows LDAP authentication when students log in, which means it has to have accounts that match a field in the LDAP system. Since we want students to be able to log in with any of their possible CSUN e-mail addresses, and not bother having to type the @csun.edu part, we needed to implement a custom log in prompt.

The web form for doing so accepts any form of e-mail address, then contacts our LDAP server to determine the person's real user id, which is then passed over to WebCT. All very smooth, and this should mean that I don't have to manually look up and reset over two freakin' hundred student WebCT passwords every term.

Now I have to learn how to implement SSL. It's easy to configure the WebCT server to do this through its installation package, but I have to go figure out how to get a security certificate and its accompanying details so that these can be entered into WebCT.

Everyone will be very happy to have the whole system secure and based on other campus accounts rather than having its own set of user IDs and passwords.