Canadian Mysteries

tighten security on teacher registration form

(Mins: 90) MF reported a bunch of spam submissions through the "register for a teacher's password" form on http://canadianmysteries.ca/teachers/login/indexen.php There was a javascript function that was supposed to be invoked onSubmit, but from what I could see, the js file (jscripts.js) was not included, so the invocation obviously would fail, and that must be treated the same as returning true, because the action does happen successfully. I also noticed that there are two forms on the register page, and each of them had an email field. That became apparent when I successfully invoked the javascript check function and got an unexpected error. So I renamed/re-id'd the email field in the login form to loginEmail and made necessary modifications to js and php code that relies on that element's name or id. Finally, as a test I added a form element mathsum, into which the user would have to put the value of a simple math question posed on the form. I don't know if implementing that will do any good at all, but I'm not going go to proceed any further unless MF reports that the other modifications have not helped reduce the spam submissions

internal email to virtual domain

(Mins: 60)

Last fall we set things up so that admin@canadianmysteries.ca was listened for at uvic and forwarded to mystery@uvic.ca. When I got back after Christmas and tried to email admin@canadianmysteries, I got a message from canadianmysteries.org reporting no associated email accounts.

Not sure why megamailservers is still listening for canadianmysteries.ca (dns reports primary servers are the uvic ones), but assuming they get the email, they correctly report no email accounts, because we killed the email accounts to ensure nothing went to them).

Turns out that there are two separate configurations, one for mail sent from on-campus (I'm not sure if that means geographically or from a *@uvic.ca account) and another for all other email. Somewhere over the Christmas break the first of those two (i.e. internal source) must have been modified with the result that mail from my account to admin@canadianmysteries.ca wound up at canadianmysteries.org .

Sys-admins updated their config files and everything seems to be working now.

drafts of first few new quests posted to dev account

(Mins: 30) NE has posted 6 english and 3 french quests to the nle account. I reviewed the files and the look fine and validate. The evaluation and support documents have not been uploaded for any of them. I emailed her and Merna asking about review procedure once the drafts are complete before they go to the production site.

change email settings on netlink enables FTP

(Mins: 60) NE needs a netlink account to host a dev instance of Mystery Quest site, in which to upload files. I didn't know she already had a netlink, so was investigating what it took to get an "affiliate" account. She thought she might have got one in 2006. I checked into it and sure enough she had a primary account, but with no "email" service. It turns out that if you don't have "email" service, you also don't have "ftp" or "http" based services either (i.e. you have no access to any diskspace). The helpdesk flipped that switch and now the account has email (and ftp and http) services available to it.

plan for dev instance for new mystery quests

(Mins: 30)

GUMICH is planning to build another 9 mystery quests and needs a process to do this to replace whatever the database driven infrastructure did. I wrote back to get more details, but if there is only one person doing the markup of the texts, then we'll probably get them an affiliated netlink, put a working instance of the site with some template files in there and have them get everything working in that environment. Then I can just get the files and move them into the production environment. Not sure of the technical capabilities of the editor (xhtml markup and file management).

fixed number of broken links in teacher's guides

(Mins: 90) About half the GUMICH sites had a number of broken links in the navigation bar. Clearly the navigation items had been imported from an earlier instance of the site, as they all had exactly the same errors pointing to non-existent paths (which had existed in the old instance). Did global search-and-replace to fix them all (about 6 to 8 links in each of about 14 files).

potential new mystery

(Mins: 180)

Met with JL for an hour to talk about a potential new mystery and how HCMC would be involved.
Biggest question mark is providing something to replace the workflow management capabilities provided by Emmanuel's db, which is now out of date and doesn't support all the media files which John says will be part of this mystery. Looked at possible commmercial/opensource projects and at UVic's Cascade environment. Should be able to come up with something.
Also went over budget items with John, which he then submits to the dean or research or whoever.

arrange for transfer of money

(Mins: 60) We agreed with MF and JL to transfer $1000 to HCMC towards year end in exchange for ongoing work and specifically for transfer of domain registration etc. from third-party commercial provider to provider with institutional agreement with UVic. Now that the transfer and related entailments (email forwarding) seems to be done, arranged with MF to get AS in the dean's office to do the transfer.

fix large number of broken links to

(Mins: 120) About half of the GUMICH sites had links in the navigation bar to teaching materials which pointed to non-existent files and folders. Found the correct URL for each of those and did global search and replaces over all the sites.

couple of images not the right size

(Mins: 30) MF noted a couple of images which should have a "large" and "larger" versions didn't. I checked the code and the files and in one case the links were incorrect and in the other the actual images were all the same, small size. Fixed the code and reported back on the wrongly sized images.