Fun UniKL Findings #1

UniKL’s student portal has about 5 active subdomains running for it being:

First, I’d like to say that by going to any of the site, you might notice that the url would be very long, for instance if you’d to go to portal.unikl.edu.my then the url would be something like https://cas.unikl.edu.my/cas-web/login?service=https://online2.unikl.edu.my/j_spring_cas_security_check?spring-security-redirect=/home.htm

But in general we can trim down the url via the removal of j_spring_cas_security_check?spring-security-redirect=/home.htm since to my knowledge its purpose is to send you to home, which is what it'd be doing anyways with and without the additional parameters, resulting in an url that looks bit cleaner https://cas.unikl.edu.my/cas-web/login?service=https://online2.unikl.edu.my


Why the url is so long, yet can simply be trimmed down is outside the scope of my knowledge, but what I can say at least is that this can lead to interesting results where if we’d to use the previous urls then we can get redirect such as:

Elaboration

If I remember correctly, the only active link in the past would be cas.unikl.edu.my which would send you to the student portal instead of having to do all these redirects. Now why are they doing bunch of redirections instead of having a set url? I’m not sure honestly, but I assume that it’s mainly to reduce the traffic that will be going over to a single site.

Think of it like this, if everyone flocks over to online1.unikl.edu.my, then the site will take eons to load as it doesn’t seem like their infrastructure is equipped to handle thousands of people trying to access the site at the same time. On the other hand, if they would to have 2 sites & have it implemented where some people may be redicetd to online1 whereas others would be redirected to online2, then traffic can be split into 2 sites instead of having it congested to one. This mean that if you know about this system, then you can kinda “game” it by changing your url to online2 whenever online1 is slowed to a crawl (and vice versa).

Another reason as to why they aren’t killing the cas link I feel is to ensure that the student portal is able to be accessible even for students that don’t have too much technical know-how. If I’d to wake up one day and suddenly not able to go to my student portal then I’d start freaking out. It can be somewhat mitigated if they’re telling everyone that they’d be killing off cas, but there’s not really any good way to do it, so simply having it maintained as an additional subdomain works even if it’s less pretty, no idea why it’s redirecting to portal instead of online1 or online2 though.

Conclusion

In conclusion, what can be gained from this is the fact that if you’re on online1 and the site is loading very slowly, then you can instead scoot over to online2 instead. If you’re rather indecisive then going to any of the other links would work just fine as well (I personally prefer portal because it’s more fun & feels logical to type out), though I genuinely have no idea how the back-end determines whether to send someone to online1 or online2. I suspect that it isn’t as simple as being 50-50 as on some days I find online1 being preferred whereas on other days online2 is the one being chosen. If I’ve to usher a guess, then the back-end either check for traffic on one site (online1) and would send the user to the other site if it determines that the site is currently not equipped to handle the traffic, or at least ideally that would be best. Lastly before ending this off I'd like to add couple of few notes: