[tech] UCC database

[Jonathan Van buren]

Great, thanks!
I shall investgate further, but that is exactly the information I needed.

On Sun, 22 May 2016 at 05:18 David Adam <zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au> wrote:

> On Tue, 17 May 2016, Jonathan Van buren wrote:
> > Got a question. What type of database (if any) does ucc use to store all
> > the members user account information? How accessible is this information
> (I
> > know you can finger system accounts can you also query the database for
> > information or do you need elevated privileges to do so)?
>
> As far as I know, there's two different sources of information.
>
> The authoritative database for account information - that is, user names,
> passwords, Unix and Windows user IDs, home directories and so on - is
> stored in our OpenLDAP server and accessed via LDAP. You do need elevated
> privileges to view some information such as password hashes, but you can
> have a look at what's stored as an anonymous user:
>
>  $ ldapvi '(uid=*)'
>
> This will show you the entries for all users on the system (use plain
> `ldapvi` to look through the entire database, but there is lots of other
> uninteresting system information inside).
>
> However, the membership register - which contains full names, addresses,
> student numbers and so on - is maintained separately. At the moment I
> think we're still using MemberDB, which [PXY] started and I continued
> with, renamed as the Gumby Management System (after the Fish Management
> System, an old machine database at UCC - after all G follows F :-).
>
> This is accessible at:
>   https://secure.ucc.asn.au/members/
>
> You do need to be on committee (or have committee add you) as obviously
> this information is private.
>
> GMS is written in a Python framework called Django, and the thing about it
> that made it so suitable is that the entire thing is under 100 lines of
> code and configuration. You can have a look at the source, I think - it's
> in /services/gms with the bulk of the code in
> /services/gms/memberdb/models.py.
>
> This sits on top of a PostgreSQL database, although that's entirely an
> implementation detail - in the past it was a SQLite database in the
> secretary's home directory.
>
> There have been plans for years to merge these two databases, or to
> rewrite MemberDB/GMS into something bigger that would allow online signups
> or even payments. The former is a bad idea - we need to keep historical
> records and carefully protect the privacy of the information, and OpenLDAP
> makes this easy to mess up. The latter is a great idea, but it's quite
> hard and involves words like "workflow" which are no fun.
>
> David Adam
> zanchey@
>
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