Re: [Phphelpdesk-help] compatibility with NIS/yp

[Roy R. <rs...@ae...>]

On Tue, 30 Jul 2002, mmoriarty wrote:
> Ive successfully deployed phphelpdesk on our unix server, and it is
> working really well. Looking ahead, I want our students to log calls
> directly on the system, as there is around 600 of them and they already
> have NIS accounts and encrypted passwords, I would rather that they
> could resuse these to log into helpdesk and use the system. Would anyone
> know of a way to achieve this? The other alternative is to let each year
> log in as a single user but then they would see each others logs rather
> than seeing a personalised view
> Any suggestions would be most welcom

There are two ways I can think of that would achieve this:
A) Modify PHPHD to actually be able to deal with external usernames and
   passwords
This would be non-trivially difficult.  It's not impossible (mostly because
querying user rights doesn't happen very often in the program), but would
be ... kinda messy.  The best approach, I suppose, would be to create some
sort of external user API that could be queried if you couldn't find a user
in the database.  Shamefully, I have to admit that the more I think of it,
the more I think it's actually doable, but I'm not sure I'd want to tackle
if if I didn't have a good week or so of free time to do it properly (of
course, this is impacted by whether or not you want to engineer things in a
way you can later contribute back to the source or merge with new versions
of PHPHD);

B) Data import/export
This is much more trivially easy -- just run some sort of program every
night that imports the NIS accounts into PHPHD and removes old accounts
that have been deleted from NIS.  You'd want to make some sort of maker for
these rows in the security table so you'd know they're associated with NIS
accounts, of course.

(A) is more elegant; (B) is simpler.  A competent PHP programmer probably
could do (B) in an hour or two.  The issue of dealing with the standard
UNIX-encrypted passwords is left up to the student as an exercise. :)

-roy