CERN Accelerating science

How to Inspect and Update your Information in the Computer Centre Database (CCDB)

  Geneviève Ferran CN/ASD

We have received consistent user feedback about the need for a tool which, enlarging the current capabilities of emdir, would allow users to edit and display (parts of) their own registered entry in our ORACLE-based Computer Center Database (CCDB) without having to contact their group administrators (who can also make the same changes via userreg).

In response to this, we have developed the xuserinfo application, a GUI FORMS interface which accesses CCDB directly. This application will be made available during the current month of December on the centrally supported Services: PLUS (CERNSP, HPPLUS, DXPLUS), WGS Servers (Atlas, CMS, etc) and VXCERN.

Using this application you will be able to access the following information:

• basic data (name, firstname, preferred_firstname, division, birthday),
• preferred UNIX shell,
• e-mail data (physical and generic e-mail addresses),
• experiments that you participate in,
• group administrators,
• accounts,
• private hosts (for pre-authenticifation on the MAILSERVer and for listbox).

This information is modifiable to an extent which depends on whether or not the user is known to CERN's Human Resources Database (HR). Specifically :

All users will be able to modify their:

• preferred firstname,
• preferred UNIX shell (this will only affect newly registered accounts),
• generic address for e-mail (i.e. Joe.User@cern.ch),
• preferred physical e-mail address (i.e. juserid@mail.cern.ch),
• private hosts.

Changes to both the generic address and physical e-mail address will become effective for mail delivery after approximately one day. Physical e-mail address changes are transmitted immediately to emdir.

In addition, those users not known to HR will be able to change their:

• firstname,
• birthday (mm-dd),
• Home Institute,
• CERN division,
• experiment(s) in which they participate.

For users known to HR the above set of data can only be changed by contacting either the User's Office or your divisional secretariat who can make the change in HR directly. A direct corollary of this is that if you are not currently known to HR and then later are entered into HR, the above set of data will be reset to the HR values.

It should be noted that xuserinfo, like userreg, imposes certain data validation criteria for data changes. Error messages and pop-up lists are available to assist the user in this respect.

As noted above, xuserinfo is a GUI application and as such will be slower (to load) than the xwho service, and thus it is recommended to use it only to change information or to inspect data (e.g. UNIX shell, private hosts). Group administrators will have no particular privilege in xuserinfo - they will only see their own data.

Please note that the xwho service remains the recommended tool to inspect CCDB information. xwho can be used by anybody to see the information about anybody else (including herself or himself), while xuserinfo is to view/edit data for oneself. Changes made via xuserinfo will be reflected in xwho the next day.

In the context of CCDB, on the timescale of the next few months, our plan is to phase out the emdir interface completely and eventually to absorb the emdir database into CCDB.