Technical Artefact for Learning Management System(LMS)

Learning Management System School Network Design for Project in Masters

1. Password Policy

Following is a Password Policy developed for our School System:

The users should not choose simple passwords such as ‘Password’, ‘123456’ or ‘ABCDEF’.
The users should not use their personal information such as Birthdate, Contact Number, their first or last names in the Password.
The users should choose the combination of letters, digits, and special characters as their password.
The password length should be between 8 to 16 characters.
The users are encouraged to use Random Password Generators to create strong passwords.
The users should also change their passwords frequently to avoid the unauthorized access of their accounts.
The existing users should not use their previous or current passwords while changing their passwords.
The existing users should also follow all the statements mentioned in the Password Policy while changing their passwords.
The users should not share their passwords with any other users or write them on their computers.

2. Risk Assessment

2.1 Asset Identification

Following are the list of assets owned by the school categorized into different categories:

Asset Type	Information Assets	Data Classification	Impact to Profitability	Overall Risk Ranking
Infrastructure	School department cabin devices (Computers, Printers, Tablets, Cables, Scanners, Smartphones etc.)	Confidential	Low	4
School Servers and Data Centres	Highly Confidential	Very High	1
Other Network devices and Equipment (Switches, Routers, Cables)	Confidential	Medium	3
Other Infrastructure (Buildings, Departments, Cabins, Rooms)	Very Less Confidential	Low	5
Informational	Teachers and Student Personal Information	Highly Confidential	High	2
Teachers and Students Financial Information	Very Highly Confidential	Very High	1
Assessment and Grade Information	Highly Confidential	High	3
Backup Files	Highly Confidential	High	2
Exam Paper Information	Highly Confidential	High	2
School Network Monitoring Information	Confidential	Medium	4
School Policies	Confidential	Medium	4
Users	Executive Management and Teachers	Confidential	High	3
Students	Confidential	Very High	3
	Staff Members	Confidential	Medium	4
	Parents and Visitors	Low Confidential	Low	5

Legend: Overall Risk Rankings – 1 (Very High-Risk Ranking) and 5 (Low-Risk Ranking)

3. Proof of Concept (PoC) Implementation

School Web Site:

As it is not possible to demonstrate physical structure of the school building, we are going to use AWS public cloud to setup servers and host School Website and Media hosting site.

Here we used Forma LMS for Website setup, we can have our own site in future and hosted on the AWS or physical servers. Also, we used EMBY for media server.

Connect AWS Console and open EC2 service to create instances

Choose Ubuntu OS as AMI

Select t2.micro instance since its just demo school website

Select t2.micro instance since its just demo school website

Select subnet and vpc details also define instance count to three as we are going to use two nodes for Website behind load balancer and one for Media hosting

Keep default storage as we don’t need more at this stage

Keep default storage as we don’t need more at this stage

Setup security group and allow http/https/ssh ports

Setup security group and allow http/https/ssh ports

Three instances are ready

Move to RDS service and setup centralize database for the School website, two of the instances will be connecting to the same database

Select standard MySQL database

Choose free tier eligible database and configure database name, username, and password

Database is ready, now we can see all connection details in the screenshot

Forma Learning Management System (LMS):

Connect both webservers and for Forma LMS setup
Update packages

Install apache for webserver hosting

Start and enable the service

Installing php dependancy packages for School website

Install php dependancy packages for School website

Connect to the RDS database and create new database for School website, also grant admin permission to the new user

Now, lets download Forma LMS source

Extract the zip file

Update necessary permission so webserver can access the application data
Update Apache configuration to point to the application path

Site is ready, let’s open it in a browser and finish one time installation

System check information

Accept License terms and conditions

Configure database details

Configure admin user and password

Setting up database and language

Installation completed, now download the config.pp file and copy it to both webservers

Default home page

Add new courses and other details

Admin section

Here are the URL for individual webserver we setup for the school site, both points to the same RDS database so updating details on one site can immediately reflect in second site, we will later put both sites behind load balancer so it can be accessed with single link.

Server1: http://ec2-13-55-170-225.ap-southeast-2.compute.amazonaws.com/

Server2: http://ec2-13-54-51-221.ap-southeast-2.compute.amazonaws.com/

EMBY MEDIA Server: