Administrator Guide

Settings

You can change several different settings within Podcast LX: availability, encoding, IP restrictions, and external storage. To manage Podcast LX settings, navigate to the Administrator Panel and select the Manage Podcast LX link.

Availability

Set the availability of podcast feeds. If disabled, only course members can view course podcast content from within the course. If enabled, course members may subscribe to course podcast feeds.

1. Navigate to the System Admin tab.
2. Select the Manage Podcast LX link.
3. Select the Manage Settings link.
4. Set the General Availability option for Podcast LX feeds across the system.

 

 

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Options

Podcast feed URLs will include information about the course in which the feed resides. This may make it possible for course members to deduce the podcast feed URL for courses in which they are not a member. If this is a concern, the URL encoding option can prevent this. Enabling URL encoding for podcast feeds system-wide will obscure the location of the feed within the URL by substituting the identifying course information with a randomly-generated string. This will make it impossible for course members to deduce the URL for other courses' podcast feeds.

1. Enable URL encoding of the podcast feed to obscure the location of the feed.

 

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Network IP Restrictions

Access to podcast feeds can be restricted by users' IP addresses. When this is done, users will only be able to access course podcast feeds when they are using a computer with an IP address that falls within the specified allowed ranges.

 

 

Restrict feed access by IP address as follows:

1. Select the Yes option for the Restrict Access by IP Address field.
2. In the Allowed IP Ranges text box, specify the IP addresses or ranges of IP addresses that can access course feeds.

IP addresses or range of IP addresses can be specified as follows:

1. To allow IP addresses that follow a specific pattern, use an asterisk (*) as a wildcard.  For example, to allow feed access to all IP addresses that begin with "10.128", add "10.128.*.*" in the text box.
2. To allow a range of IP addresses, use a hyphen between the start and end IP address within the range. For example, to allow access to all IP addresses between 10.128.12.1 and 10.128.12.20, add "10.128.12.1-10.128.12.20" in the text box.
3. To allow access to specific, separate IP addresses, add each IP address in the text box separated by a comma.

Click the Submit button on the form to save the Podcast LX system settings.

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External Storage

Administrators can specify an external server on which all Podcast LX content should be stored. This feature copies all uploaded podcast content to a remote host rather than the default course content directory on the Blackboard server using the scp command.

 

 

The external storage feature allows administrators to specify an external server on which Podcast LX content should be stored in order to limit the impact on the Blackboard server's disk space.

 

Copy Uploaded Files to a File Server

Select "Yes" to enable the external storage feature.

 

File Server Host

Specify the remote host that will be storing the Podcast LX content files.

 

Username

Specify the administrator username to login to the external storage server using SSH.

 

Password

Specify the password used with the above-specified username to login to the external storage server.

 

Remote Directory

Enter the path to the destination directory on the external storage server.Blackboard context parameters may be used to specify used. For example, to specify that a podcast content should be stored in a folder for the course, you may specify the following directory:

/home/www/@X@course.course_id@X@/@X@content.pk_string@X@

For more information on the Blackboard context parameters syntax, review the Blackboard Building Blocks Developers Guide.

 

External File URL

Enter the URL from Podcast LX content can be downloaded from the external storage server. Note that the filename of the Podcast content will be appended to the end of the specified URL. Blackboard context parameters may also be used in this URL.

Example:
http://podcasts.example.edu/@X@course.course_id@X@/@X@content.pk_string@X@