[Labs-l] Reimplementing account expiries

Fri Feb 3 15:49:11 UTC 2017

Hey guys, I thought I would throw a quick suggestion in to the mix.  We frequently encounter situations where labs hits resource limits because of tools consuming space, either by negligence, or the owner disappeared.

Toolserver had remedies to counteract some of this.  Every 6 months, tool server users were required to verify that the account was still being used, otherwise it would get deactivated.  This allowed for tools that were no longer maintained or not being used to not needlessly consume resources.  I would propose something similar on tool labs.  

My proposal is that every 6 months tool labs users must confirm their accounts as active accounts, maybe with a simple CLI command, confirmaccount.  The users get an email reminder, and are reminded on login.  If they fail to comply, the web service and all active jobs submitted from the user in the grid, as well as all active non-root processes get terminated, and the crontab disabled.  They can still login, and confirm their account in which the crontab will be restored, as well as all submitted jobs resubmitted, and web service restored.  If however, the user fails to login 6 months after account deactivation, the tool should be considered abandoned, with 1 year no activity, and the tool, that is the NFS folder containing it and the MySQL DB, gets deleted and space reabsorbed for other services.

Alternatively, activity can be simply confirmed by routinely SSHing into the tool while it’s active and the timer automatically resets to 6 months, and with 6 months of no activity the tool gets deactivated as mentioned above and the user is required to run the confirm account command to restore services.  This would help with resource usage limits and make it easier for ops I would imagine.  With the recently founded committee for taking over abandoned tools, tool takeover should be a much smooth process if there is still interest in the tools, even with the owner gone.  Thoughts?

Cyberpower678
English Wikipedia Account Creation Team
English Wikipedia Administrator
Global User Renamer

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