Tag Archives: semester

Aug 21

Friday Post: Start of Semester

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Hey All,

Sorry for not posting last weekend.  I needed a break.  I have been super swamped these past two weeks.  Fall semester begins on Monday, and for some reason, this feels like a weird one.  Something is in the air.  My team is launching a new app for teachers and students.  It’s coming out of pilot phase after a year.  I’m so excited and nervous!

Of course things didn’t roll out as they were supposed to.  Network errors, department ticket freezes, ubuntu issues…everything but the software has been blowing up around me.  Though this means on Monday, everything will work A-Ok!.  If everything went smoothly, I would really be worried 😀

Next week, once I hopefully have some time to breathe, I will have some big things to post about.

Have a great weekend, and a great start of classes to my fellow friends in Academia!

-Shea

Jan 10

Friday Post: Django, AWS, and oAuth

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Hey All,

So the semester begins on Monday, meaning this whole week our department has been dealing with semester startup.  Making sure all our apps are tested, available, and production ready.  One of my apps has become the guinea pig for moving our infrastructure into the cloud.  This has been a really fun experience like rewriting parts to save to S3 instead of the filesystem, etc.  Except when it hasn’t been fun.  Like dealing with oAuth behind a load balancer.

Long story short, if you use Django, AWS, and oAuth or LTIs (and SSL), add this to your config file:

USE_X_FORWARDED_HOST = True
SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER = ('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO', 'https')

Basically, we have our website serving HTTPS through a load balancer, and due to some other infrastructure setup, our oAuth URL was being changed during the signature check.  This caused it to become invalid.  Adding the two lines above fix the whole issue.

Have a good weekend!

-Shea