[thesite] My Intro and a look at a UEUE Proposal

[Mark Nickel]

Greetings!

Ok, Intro:....  (I'm Bill S. Preston, Esquire........ and I'm Ted
Theodore Logan...  Together we're WILD STALYONS!!!)

My name is Mark and I was able to attend Codefest 2001!!  Wheeee!  Dan
encouraged me to attend and I had a great time.

If you were watching the CodeFestCam, I was the tall guy hunched over
and watching Dan do *stuff*... :)

BTW, it was great to meet you all IRL...

While giving Dan a hard time because he forgot to build the Oracle
extensions into PHP, he shared with me the vision of UEUE.  Since User
Authentication, Authorization, and general Security  is kinda my hobby,
I was able to recommend a design that I had seen in the O'Reilly "Eagle"
book.

With some "encouragement" from Dan, :) I was assigned/delegated the task
of putting together a little write-up of how we could use the Ticketing
idea from the "Eagle" book applied to UEUE.

(/me don's flame-retardant suit)
Please see my m.e.o site:  http://members.evolt.org/mnickel and take a
gander at the UEUE stuff.

The Infrastructure documentation is a little bit rambling but if you
read the relevant stuff from the "Eagle" link and the proposed
extensions that I recommend, you should get the general idea of how
things would work.  I will be cleaning up the documentation as I get
feedback from folks...

To Martin's point:
> Are there firm migration & communication plans already
> for people with multiple logins (IOW do we know exactly
> how we're going to move them over, including how to tell
> them), or do we need to still think about those things?

I hadn't really gotten to the migration/communication point yet.  One
possibility would be to establish a hierarchy among all of the evolt.org
sites.  eg:  a.e.o login id's would have a higher priority/ranking than
w.e.o id's... So whichever ID you have that fits into the highest level
in the hierarchy would become your UEUE ID...   Something like that....

I would probably be a good exercise to run through the USER table and
determine how many accounts are duplicates... Possibly doing a COUNT()
on a GROUP BY user.email_address or something...  This would of course
assume that the user in question would have used the same email address
throughout all their evolt.org ID's....

Again, please forgive the rambling nature of the UEUE documentation.
Basically it's the same as the O'Reilly stuff except that it adds
authorization checking for each Child Server and it's done in PHP
instead of mod_perl.

In that waaaay far future, this Ticketing-style stuff will probably
break down and we'll have to go with some type of XML-RPC/SOAP
infrastructure.  Then the Child Servers/Sites wouldn't all have to exist
in the *.evolt.org domain... :)

Again, Pleasure to meet you all!
Mark

Oh, profile/skillz stuff:
Day Job:  Senior Systems Analyst
Skillz:  RedHat/Slackware Linux, HPUX, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Progress
4GL/DB, Perl, Java, Enhydra, PHP, a bit o' the Javascript, HTML, XML,
Pretty much all aspects of Unix Systems Administration...  Jack-of-All
Trades  :)  DB2 if I have to...

No applicable knowledge of Oracle (gasp, I know).  That's why I like the
evolt.org stuff.  Gives me a chance to learn it.

Been doing my professional life for about 7 years and most of the above
technologies for 6 or so.... Well, except for the XML.. :)  But I mean
really, how many people have *actually* been using it in a production
mode for 5+ years... :)

--
"Caution: Cape does not enable user to fly."

-Batman costume warning label