Willie Walker wrote:

> Thanks everyone!  Do you know what the timeframe is to replace the
> existing system?

Not a detailed ETA, no - although it is currently being worked on, and 
source will be made available as soon as we have something that is 
vaguely working.

The problem we have is that we need to provide something new whilst 
keeping the existing system working until we replace it.  The main 
stumbling block is that the existing portal application has the 
opensolaris user details intermingled with the portal data - page 
content, site access control data and so forth.  In addition the 
database itself is accessed through an in-memory cache (Hibernate). 
That means it is impossible to share the database between applications 
without hitting cache consistency problems.  We tried putting a 
distributed cache behind hibernate some time ago, and it was an abject 
failure.

The plan for the new system is to separate all the user data into a 
separate database managed by a new webapp.  Applications that need to 
authenticate and check the authorisations of users will communicate with 
the auth service via XMLRPC.

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/website/website_restructuring/ has 
an overview of the plan.

As for a new CAPCHA system, I quite like the look of 
http://recaptcha.net/, although I'm not entirely sure about making our 
CAPCHA system dependent on an external service, we'd need some sort of 
fallback in case the recapcha site was down.

-- 
Alan Burlison
--
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