[tech] UCC database

[oxinabox at ucc.asn.au]

At one point I listed out the secondary information stores.

There it the Coke database, that stores all the information about 
dispense,
plus whether or not people are on door.

There is a flat-file listing all lifemembers.
The TLA's are stored in a *almost* flat-file -- but easier to query via 
the tla script.

I think there are quiet a few others.
Eg everyone's email forwarding address is in there .forward file.
(Which may disagree with the email in memberdb)

[*OX]




On 22.05.2016 10:47, Jonathan Van buren wrote:
> 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/ [1]
>> 
>> 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@
> 
> 
> Links:
> ------
> [1] https://secure.ucc.asn.au/members/
> 
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