UMRA – SSRPM Moodle Login Authentication

If you haven’t already download the free trial version of User Management Resource Administrator here > Download

Download Self Service Password Reset Manager SSRPM > Download

If you want to learn the basics on how to connect to UMRA with its COM object, please see my original post on “Basics of UMRA COM”.

UMRA – SSRPM Moodle Login Authentication

In previous blogs I’ve talked about ways you can have SSRPM as your user authentication method for an Employee Self Service type portal, or use both UMRA and SSRPM together to integrate an Employee Self Service option into the SSRPM web authentication. Both of these methods are very power, and scalable models, however as I’ve talked about before, SSRPM challenge/response mechanism can be used as a verification security system before another process is started. What do I mean? Well, since Self Service Password Reset Manager SSRPM has the ability to authenticate a user even if they are not part of your LAN or even in another domain, we can use this to our advantage. So how am I using this with Moodle? I was tasked to have Moodles LDAP Authentication method to check first if the user who is logging into Moodle, is actually enrolled into SSRPM, if they are not, then force them to enroll into SSRPM. If they are enrolled into SSRPM then allow them to log into Moodle. The second part of this is, if the user forgets his or her password, they can now use SSRPM to authenticate themselves using the challenge and response questions, once verified, they can now either change their password in Active Directory, or directly in Moodle.

UMRA – SSRPM Moodle Login Authentication How To

So if any of you are out there trying to create such an authentication model using SSRPM and UMRA I will give you a few tips and a quick walk through on how you can accomplish this. First if you haven’t already, your Moodle install will need to have a test user who is not being authenticated with LDAP, and another user who is. You will also need to have a user who is enrolled into SSRPM and another test user who is not.

Step 1 -
Install SSRPM and configure it.

Step 2 -
You will need to edit Moodle’s login procedure, this is on login.php file located in the main root file, it’s not the file located in the blocks directory.
Tip –
You will see a method in login.php called “LDAP Authentication”, you will need to either run a function before this to check the username entered is in the SSRPM database. If the user is within the enrolled users table in the SSRPM database, then allow the user to login to Moodle. If they are not within the enrolled users table, then use the http redirect method to have them redirected to your SSRPM web interface.

I hope this helps anyone out there who is trying to do such a Moodle / SSRPM Login Authentication check. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me or comment.