Administrator's Guide
- Former user (Deleted)
Information
This is the administrators guide to SakaiAdminX and should be read in conjunction with the Administrators section of the Using SakaiAdminX guide for how to do things. This guide assumes you know how to login and navigate around SakaiAdminX(its in the other guide) and will tell you what you need to do to get SakaiAdminX running and keep it running.
This guide also assumes you know your way around the Realms in Sakai.
The very first login
Your very first login to Sakai should be with your Sakai admin user (assuming this user is in the admin realm with the admin role).
In SakaiAdminX, go to Diagnostics > Configuration check. Run the configuration checker. If you receive any errors or warnings, please review them and adjust your Sakai environment/SakaiAdminX configuration accordingly.
Repeat this procedure until all tests pass.
Once all your tests pass, go to 'Super admin users' and add/remove users as necessary. You should give super admin access to a user account that you will be using to setup the data in SakaiAdminX as you don't want to use the Sakai admin user for this (that would be like using the 'root' user for every day tasks; ie bad practice).
Once you have given yourself superadmin access, logout and log back in as yourself. If you did it all correctly, you should see the Admin section in the navigation bar.
Admin users
The list of admin users in SakaiAdminX comes from the same place Sakai gets them, the admin realm in Sakai. If you want to add someone as as super admin user, they will be added to the admin realm in Sakai with the admin role. Changes made to super admin users are instantaneous.
Helpdesk users
Helpdesk users in SakaiAdminX also come from the admin realm in Sakai but they have the 'helpdesk' role instead. Changes made to super helpdesk users are dependent on the next run of the SuperHelpdeskUserSync Quartz job, as due to the design of the Security model in Sakai, these need to be synchronised separately.
Once a user is listed as a super helpdesk user, then when they click 'Go to Site' from within SakaiAdminX, they will be logged in as the helpdesk user and can access all sites as the helpdesk user (assuming the above quartz job has completed adding the helpdesk user to every site)
Clients
The concept of clients is that every site is owned by a client. This could be an education institution or a business or whatever you like. You can then assign client admin and client helpdesk users to these clients and they have admin/helpdesk privileges to only those sites in that client. This means that SakaiAdminX has the potential to allow a single instance of Sakai to be run for multiple institutions with their own administrative perople looking after their set of sites, without compromising security for the rest of the sites they shouldn't be able to manage.
You must have at least one client. If you only have one client (ie you are running Sakai for only one institution or group), that is fine, but you still need a client defined.
Client admin users
As above, client admin and helpdesk users have access to only those sites attached to that client. These users are synchronised frequently via the ClientAdminAndClientHelpdeskUserSync Quartz job.
You can manage the client admin/helpdesk users in the Client admin users section. If you have only one client, the users for that client will be listed. If you have multiple clients you must first choose the client you want to list the users for and then you can manage those users in that client.
Data management
The data management area of SakaiAdminX is critical to it's proper running. It's very important to get the data here correctly configured BEFORE doing anything else in SakaiAdminX.
Most data out of the box will be ok for a new installation however you will need to add new skin entries here so they are available on the creating/editing forms, any new site types you want to create so they are also available on forms, modify any existing roles etc.
Backing up/restoring the Derby database
As part of your system maintenance you should backup the SakaiAdminX Derby database.
Backing up
You can initiate backup or restore from ij, or from a JDBC application. The entire database directory can be copied when the system is offline using operating system commands. If the transaction log directory is different from the database directory, make sure that the transaction log directory is also copied. During the restore operation, transaction logs are necessary to bring the database to a consistent state.
Offline backup can also be performed without bringing the database system offline by freezing the system (blocking all write operations) while copying the database directory. The system procedure to do that is SYSCS_UTIL.SYSCS_FREEZE_DATABASE(). Once the copy is complete, unfreeze (allow write operations) the system using the SYSCS_UTIL.SYSCS_UNFREEZE_DATABASE() procedure; this procedure call will set the system back to normal state.
SakaiAdminX has a built in method to backup your database without taking the system offline. You can either back it up manually by navigating to Admin > Data Management and clicking backup the database or by requesting, via HTTP, the URL
http://your.sakaiadminx.server/sakaiadminx/data/backup
This will return the status of the backup to you. Currently this requires authorisation but that will be amended in a future release. For now, click the button to backup your database.
Restoring from a backup
The backup image of a database is used to restore the database to the state it was in, when the backup image was taken. The database is restored from the backup by specifying the connection URL attribute restoreFrom=<backup path> on the first connection to the database. Note that the backup path must include the database name in the backup, not just the backup location.
The database will be restored to the location specified on the connection URL or to the current derby.system.home location if no path is specified on the connection URL. If a database with the same name exists at the current database location it will be removed first, and then restored from the backup.
ij>connect 'jdbc:derby:/path/to/your/db/sakaiadminx;restoreFrom=/path/to/your/backup/sakaiadminx';
For more information see Backing up a derby database.
The quartz jobs
The quartz jobs are essential for the running of SakaiAdminX. They are easily installed and often need no extra settings to be made at all (unless your roles/users in Sakai differ vastly from a normal Sakai environment). That being said, its still very easy to configure them.
Please see the Quartz jobs section of the Installation Guide for detailed information.