Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Tom Barton <>]

Peter,

Thanks *very much* for giving that feedback. It really helps us to know
just where we should focus on making the doc and the installation
process better.

And please do continue giving us the benefit of your once-only newbie
reactions as you pick up additional grouper components.

Thanks,
Tom

On 12/22/2011 10:24 AM, Peter Schober wrote:
> After what will be 6 years next March I'm building a Grouper prototype
> again. This time for central IT's new Active Directory deployment,
> where provisioning institutional and manually managed groups to AD
> (and other systems after that) will be relevant, as well as providing
> some self-service web interface for department admins -- but don't
> assume that I remember or understand or know /anything/ about Grouper.
> I'm starting completely from scratch.
>
> A few "first" impressions, as long as they're fresh. This is meant in
> the spirit of the Shibboleth project, who always encourage people new
> to the software to point out what's difficult when beginning, since
> that's a perspective you (hopefully) quickly lose.
>
> I started out with the QS, after looking though the wiki serching for
> the actual installation docs: there's the "Getting Started" part of
> the work-in-progress Grouper Book, the "Admin Guide"'s API
> installation -- once you figure out that the "API" is the main Grouper
> component, the "Grouper Getting Started Quickly" page, and probably
> more institution specific ones. I'm not sure at this point that having
> all this helps.
>
> Lots of references to Grouper 1.4 and 1.5 thoughout the docs, but that
> of course doesn't mean that they're broken or incorrect when
> substituting 2.x for those.
>
> From the QS Linux install (ant ui): "type default and press enter".
> What kind of default is this when it defaults to "exit" and you
> literally need to type "default"? Very minor blemish and might be some
> ant thing, of course.
>
> I haven't yet figured out where to unpack and build stuff vs. where
> the software and it's data are installed. I had to fight a bit with
> logs not ending up where I would want them, and having the wrong
> permissions (since they seemingly needed to be written to by the user
> running the stuff on the console, as well as the user the container
> runs as; both non-root in my case). I moved logs and software
> directories where I wanted them and left a myriad of symlinks where
> there where, for now (so I wouldn not have to change all those
> properties files with "../grouper" references etc. I did set up
> grouper.home property in my containers environment). I'll look into
> this later, once I learn more about involved files.
>
> Beyond that I haven't done much yet except explore the UIs:
>
> Simple things like browsing though the groups and trying to add a
> member where confusing at first: I saw that there was an "Ian Windsor"
> in some group, so I tried to add this user to another group (Admin UI).
> But searching for "Ian" or typing "Ia" in the LiteUI (for
> auto-completion) didn't bring up any results -- only when written in
> lower-case ("ian", "ia") results where found. Even though the results
> themselfs were presented in initcaps ("Peter Bush", "Ian ...").
>
> When in the Lite UI I always seem to want to click on folders to
> browse the hierarchy but these are not clickable. They are in the
> Admin UI, though.
>
> When I select a group in "Create or edit groups and roles" (Lite UI)
> and then "edit group/role", and then "memberships" at the bottom, I
> lose the standard header with the Internet2 and Grouper logos,
> including a link to the "Main Menu". It's all there one click before
> that. Looking closely there's "Admin UI" and "Lite UI menu" written in
> tiny letters right to the name of the group (in the line "Current
> location is").  But I wonder why logos, logout link, etc. all vanish
> on that specific level. Using the browsers back button the group I
> selected before is of course gone and I'm back to searching for it
> again. Making the group itself (in the line "Current location is")
> clickable (in the "Group membership update lite" page) would make this
> unnecessary, I would hope.
>
> After searching for a group (LiteUI) and selecting "Privileges"
> instead of "Memberships", the current page becomes longer and gets a
> "Group / role privileges" section. The rest of the page remains the
> same ("Main menu", "logout" links, logos are intact).
> When selecting "Memberships" the current page is replaced with a new
> one, and the header is gone. Probably this is because there might be
> many members being shown there (which is not the case in the QS, of
> course), but then having the page header there for consistency won't
> make things much worse?
>
>
> I followed "Grouper Getting Started Quickly"[1] setting up non-QS
> Grouper (RHEL6, Java6, Tomcat7 and with the Oracle RDBMS) until I had
> the grouper client fail to connect to WS (with a HTTP 403 from
> Tomcat), but I'll keep those questions for another thread if the error
> persists. I'll need to pick this up sometime after the holidays.
> Of course I also have non-technical questions about naming plans etc.
>
> General impression: Everything here is insanely complicated and I
> didn't even look at the loader, provisioning and the Subject API :)
>
> cheers,
> -peter
>
> [1] 
> https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/Grouper/Grouper+Getting+Started+Quickly