Discussion of the Userids File for Experts

The magic Userids file

The "magic" Userids file, /software/accounts-userids/data/Userids has its master copy maintained on mfcf.math.uwaterloo.ca, and cscf.cs.uwaterloo.ca regularly receives updates from that.

To see how it is supposed to be automatically maintained look, on mfcf.math.uwaterloo.ca, at cronjobs in the accounts-userids and local_mfcf.math.uwaterloo.ca packages. I.e.

• /software/accounts-userids/export/crontab
• /software/local_mfcf.math.uwaterloo.ca/export/crontab

The program /software/accounts-userids/servers/update_userids updates the Userids file automatically with information from WatIAM (UWdir), via the file /software/accounts-master/data/downloaded/Extract. The cronjob in the local_mfcf.math.uwaterloo.ca package regularly copies that to cscf.cs.uwaterloo.ca, using rdist.

Format of the file consists of 4 colon-separated fields; id-number(s), userid(s), real name and comments. The first two fields can contain multiple values, separated by commas.

E.g.

    72193421,11116733,e39929453,hr225521,19931104-djhobbscap,P-69221:djhobbscap,ccng.hobbscap:Hobbscap, David J:2010/Jul/08 - UWdir

If you edit the program by hand, use the check_userids command to ensure consistency. The file must be maintained in its appropriate sorted order. Typically you will want to add a record which will correspond to what update_userids will create the next morning.

The following will reveal several records which had special id-numbers indicating that the accounts are special non-humans, and not in WatIAM.

    grep -v '^[^:][^:][^:]' /software/accounts-userids/data/userids | \\
       awk -F: '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

-- AdrianPepper - 19 Oct 2011

Referers

• IncludeSponsorsDataCreatingUserids