I’ve shied away from psoting during the last few weeks. The main reason is that I just haven’t progressed with the LDAP issues that beset me a couple of weeks back.
We’ve tried lots of port redirection and the like, but in the end we just can’t seem to force the remote workers laptops to send LDAP requests down the VPN.
Well, i focussed on something else for a week and attended my C# programming course with Learning tree, and on the last day of the Course, I had another Epiphany!… Web Services..
Basically, we take the LDAP lookups out of the spreadsheet, and move the whole shooting match, lock stock and 2 smoking barrels to the Web Server.
I’ve spent this morning coding the new web service and it’s now live on the SharePoint server housed within the same AppPool as the MOSS web services.
It’s function, well for now at least, all it does is offer a method called IsMemberOf(userName,groupName) and expects just a Username and a Groupname. It compares one with membership of the other and returns True or False accordingly..
Now I just have to consume the service within Excel 2003.. I’m downloading the web Services toolkit as we speak and I’ll update you soon…
As ever.. watch this space.
Well one of the things that cropped up during the review of the product is that staff want to be able to work from home.. Guess what, this wans’t in the original spec which stated that the application should be secure and only allow certain users access to certain functions.
Well to keep things simple, we decided to use LDAP queries to confirm user name against Active Directory groups. These work simply and efficiently across the network and doesn’t cause a problem. Now, introduce a home user, connected on his own Broadband connection via a VN tunneling application.
I can telnet to my AD servers on the LDAP port and I can telnet to the SQL server on 1433, What I can’t do is an LDAP DNS query to the internal server address because this goes off to my own broadband Providers DNS!
The Netmon traces show DNS queries for our domain, so need to find a way to intercept these with the Secure Application Manager to send them down the VPN, rather than allow them out to the internet.
As ever.. Watch this space.
Excuse the Matrix reference.. Couldn’t resist it..
But, sadly it is back to earth with a bump for me, The Sun, Sea and copious amounts of Sangria are over for another year and it’s a return to running the tip of my nose over corporate grinder once more.
Well the first stage of user testing has come back, and only a small amount of bugs found in the first raft of code. Most of these are due to the way the users work, rather than inherent design issues, but it’s something I’m going to need to keep in mind as this role expands. (We have some weird users..)
Whats most annoying is the raft of new features that get raised during the Bug testing.. Suddenly the program needs to do this.. does it do this? can we try this this way..? What happened to the program requirement documents, Why didn’t they ask these questions then?.. Don’t worry, thats Rhetorical, I know the answers, they just didn’t consider it possible at the time..
And thats half the problem when it comes to the Software design process, As a developer, we know what the software can and cannot do.. As a user, they often don’t consider what it can and cannot do… Getting the two to marry can be an interesting process I guess..