Communicate with ANU services team to restart talks on implementing a server on campus

[Edward-Nivison]

I have started communications with Robert from ANU services and are currently waiting on a reply.

[Edward-Nivison]

Ashleigh Johannes will be communicating with TechLauncher Teams in the coming weeks.

• School of Computing Facilities team would strongly prefer the solution to be hosted on a Linux server, preferably Debian. We can assist with setting this up.
• There is no particular documentation for the ANU. You should use HTTPS, HSTS etc. On your web frontend - but only really required once you get closer to testing and production. Our team are familiar with PostgreSQL, MySQL, noSQL, Redis databases - we would prefer not to have to support another one (such as firebase), unless there is an overwhelming strong reason to do so.
• We would prefer your solution to use ANU LDAP, and LDAPS service that is accessible from almost all IPs on campus. You should be able to find plenty of documentation on the web for using LDAP as an authentication source, also as a name service for people names etc.

The server URL is ldaps://ldap.anu.edu.au and the baseDN is "ou=People,o=anu.edu.au" (note, this baseDN is not as per modern LDAP usage, but it is what it is).

Eventually it would be good to use a Single Sign-On (SSO) solution, but even our team are unable to find sufficient documentation on how to implement that in the ANU environment. If you can make it work, I would be very interested!

[Edward-Nivison]

We are looking at using MongoDB for our database, we are awaiting a response from the School of Computing Facilities team. We are able to use HTTPS in our current implementation, and we have requested if it is possible to get a linux environment running so we can test locally.

[Edward-Nivison]

The assigned Techlauncher communication person from the School of Computing Facilities Team, Ashleigh Johannes, is away until the 21st of August. She will be able to reply after that date. So we are awaiting reply from Robert (Bob) Edwards.

[Edward-Nivison]

Hi Edward,

Thanks for reaching out again. Sorry if I have asked this already, but can you give me a (shortish) name for your project that I can use: a) for it's DNS name and b) for tracking it in our documentation?

We will agree to use it in the subject of all future correspondence with your team.

I am about ready to deploy a bare Debian server for your team, once I have a name to use.

cheers, Bob Edwards.

We are talking it over and will respond as soon as possible

[Edward-Nivison]

We have come up with something like laballoc or socolaballoc. Something along those lines as it describes well enough what we are to someone else.

Awaiting a reply

[Edward-Nivison]

I probably should have mentioned we have had a server set up for a couple weeks now and are nearly at a working state. The communication between us and the facility team has become a stand still. But if we have any issues or when we want to upgrade the server to working off campus too. We will reach out again.