Peter,
We have been using ISA Server with Blackboard now for the whole of
the last academic term. It has not been without problems in truth but is
very useful.
In terms of SSO it has been quite good, it does however not like Sun
Java one bit and people have had to disable this to use Blackboard from
home. Any page that has for instance the advanced text box likes to load
up Sun Java - this then kills the users session and pops them back to
the ISA login page, not very good at all. Looking on the Sun website
this is because the Sun VM doesn't support the ntlm authentication
method that we have been using. The current version SE 6.1 seems to be a
little better. But it is one area where using ISA has caused us
problems.
We have 2 blackboard front-end web-servers and have these externally
load balanced through ISA. This seems to have worked pretty well.
Talking to our IT people it seems we will be replacing ISA with
Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 (Whale as it was known) we will be
testing this over the next few weeks.
Marty
Martin O'Neill
Belfast Institute
-----Original Message-----
From: Blackboard/Courseinfo userslist
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Langley
Sent: 14 June 2007 14:37
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Blackboard and ISA server 2006
I have been looking into implementing a load balanced solution for our
blackboard 7.1 service. I have looked into hardware solutions which
blackboard support/recommend such as the F5 BIG IP but considering that
for resilence ideally an active/passive set up of these would be
required,
it seems an expensive solution. Therefore, I have been investigating
using
isa server 2006 and its web farm service which seems to work extremely
well with blackboard in a test enivronment set up here. As well as
possible cost savings in this solution there is also the Single Sign On
functionality which would also be extremely useful if this did work with
blackboard. Given that blackboard don't seem to support software load
balancing solutions I would be very interested to hear comments from
anyone who is using or has tried using isa server in their blackboard
environment for load balancing or even SSO.
Any help including other load balancing recommendations or SSO solutions
gratefully received!
Many thanks,
Peter Langley
Swansea University
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