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Andy Miller - Students cannot login

Andy Miller - Students cannot login

by Arnold Pizer -
Number of replies: 0
inactiveTopicStudents cannot login topic started 8/25/2006; 6:00:22 PM
last post 8/25/2006; 8:31:56 PM
userAndy Miller - Students cannot login  blueArrow
8/25/2006; 6:00:22 PM (reads: 171, responses: 2)
I imported students into my WeBWorK course following the instructions on the "Tutorial on running a course" page (using a comma-separated .lst file). As best I could tell, students' default passwords are their StudentID. Several of my students are unable to login with either loginID/studentID or loginID/loginID login-password pairs (I suspect none of them can -- I have heard no reports of success, and have heard a couple of reports of failure from the "eager beavers".)

I tried to fix this by manually resetting all their passwords to their loginID. That did not work.

On several pages (including the ClassList Editor and the Student Progress pages), I am getting the following WeBWorK warning/error message (repeated several times):

status_abbrev_to_name: status_abbrev (first argument) must be defined and non-empty at /ww/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/ContentGenerator/Instructor/UserList.pm line 1474

Is this related?

--Andy

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userMichael Gage - Re: Students cannot login  blueArrow
8/25/2006; 8:26:39 PM (reads: 211, responses: 0)
The second error is because (despite the documentation) the classList editor complains if the student's status is blank.

A workaround:

  1. select a couple of students and press "edit selected students"
  2. you don't need to do any editing, just save the results
  3. the blanks will be updated with "C" for current(ly enrolled)
If this works for a couple of students select the rest of them and perform the same procedure. For now use "C" in the .lst files for current status rather than blank.

For the first problem, I assume that you uploaded explicit passwords. I can't find where this feature is documented at the moment (the feature has been there for sometime, but hidden) Unfortunately the documentation is probably not complete. Here is a note from Sam on the issue. I'm not sure this is documented anywhere, but the password field in a classlist file is the HASHED password, not the cleartext password. If you export some users to a classlist file you'll see what I mean.

To calculate hashes for cleartext passwords, you can use the following perl one-liner:

perl -ne 'print crypt($_,join("",(".","/",0..9,"A".."Z","a".."z")[rand 64,rand 64])),"\n"'

It takes cleartext passwords as input, and outputs the corresponding hashes.

Hope this helps. If anyone can point me to the documentation on uploading explicit passwords I'll update it.

-- Mike

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userMichael Gage - Re: Students cannot login  blueArrow
8/25/2006; 8:31:56 PM (reads: 214, responses: 0)
Andy,

On further investigation of your course I see that you didn't use explicit passwords (in which case the password is set to their studentID) so the only barrier was that webwork didn't recognize the students as being currently enrolled in the course.

I've reset one student's enrollment status as a test and found that I could log in as that student -- so once you fix the enrollment problem you should be good to go.

-- Mike

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