Idea Man » Technology Links

Open source student management system

ideaman — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 16:36:29 +0000

Every once and a while I get to talking to the folks that manage our student information system (Banner) and man…. does it sound like a big mountain of complicated code and applications (with a hefty price tag to boot)! Student information systems have been in use for a long time now and I wondered if it might be the right time for an open source one to come along? Couldn’t enough people agree on what might be considered a set of best practices? I talked about it in passing with some people here, just as a “wouldn’t it be interesting if…?” conversation and one response I got was that many schools think that the way they do their processes is the right way (or better yet, the only way) so getting people to agree on something would be hellish. But… take a look at course management systems… Moodle is popular and so isn’t Sakai, maybe they could follow the trends set by those products? On a similar note, I just got the newest issue of Network Computing Magazine where they survey their readers for what erks them, one entry on the cover said “7% say open-source projects are run by sanctimonious elitists”!

Stop opening random TCP/UDP ports

ideaman — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 15:50:25 +0000

Maybe I am naive, but I would think it would be a lot easier from a security monitoring stand point to stop have processes like rpc and ftp opening up random ports. I want to be able to take a baseline of what ports a server is listening on and if there are any new ports opened afterwards then there is a good chance it has been compromised. And it would make the firewall admins a life a lot easier too!

xml language for mail filtering

ideaman — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 20:11:03 +0000

I want to be able to use any capable IMAP email client (okay, there aren’t too many capable ones I know…) and be able to manipulate my email filters at the server level instead of at the client level. A couple of reasons for this are…

If I set a filter (ex: a vacation response message) I don’t want to have to keep my local email client turned on to process the message.
If my computer croaks I do not want to have to rebuild all of my email filters.
Part of my job is testing different email applications, I should only have to create the filters in one place. Right now we use the CommuniGate Pro email server here at work and I am testing its MAPI connector for outlook and its pretty slick. Within outlook you can manipulate your server side email filters. I don’t think it would be rocket science to create an XML language that defines how a filter works (ex: the filter has a descriptive name like “Trash messages from Janet” and it has some parameters to follow like “If the senders email address is janet@interplanet-janet.com” then tie an action to it like “move to the IMAP ‘trash’ folder”. Of course you could have multiple parameters and actions and they just end up being more tags inside the XML for that filter. What would be great is if you could store these XML filters on a different server using https or something and just point your email server and your client at it (just like you can do with an address book in LDAP). The server can point to it to know how to process your messages and the client needs to point to it so you can use tools to add/edit/delete your email filters.

I think I’ll get started on it (:^)