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Bernd Pollermann CN/DCI
After an
introduction to the xwho service
(i.e. what you get via http://consult.cern.ch/xwho
or the UNIX commands
xwho and phone)
in the last CNL,
I will describe now the mechanism/data behind xwho
and what to do when things go wrong.
Before coming to the article itself, please let me remind you that,
as already announced
in CNL 224, the only correct way of referring to a person
in a Web page is:
http://consult.cern.ch/xwho/people/ccid
(where ccid is the Computer Centre ID).
Mechanisms and data behind XWHO
The xwho service is the recommended way of accessing
account- and phone book-data and users are usually quite happy
with the tools for using this service. So, expectations run high
also for the quality of the data. However, the present complexity
of the updating process and the high number of people involved
as data providers lead, sometimes, to delays in updating the
xwho information or even to wrong data.
Who provides the information?
An estimated 300 people with special privileges enter data every single
week! Involved are members of the UO (Users' Office), the divisional
secretaries and secretaries of the experiments, the group administrators,
some members of the UCO, and last not least you, the users.
If any of these info-providers make a mistake, the xwho data
end up being wrong!
How do data flow into XWHO?
An estimated 20 people are involved in the program part
dealing with the xwho data flow. These programs
- allow one to enter data
(Human Resources (HR) database tools: userreg,
xuserinfo, and, for the time being, emdir),
- prepare the generic addresses for e-mail,
- merge data from all sources and finally,
- extract data from Oracle.
If anything goes wrong in one of these steps,
the xwho data end up being delayed
(program failures will rarely cause wrong data in xwho, because
checking algorithms will prevent an update).
What to do when things go wrong
What we can do from our side, especially as far as improvements
on the "data taking" side and the simplification of the data
flow are concerned, is in progress or already done (see the
article "How to Inspect and Update your
Information in the Computer Centre Database (CCDB)"
on xuserinfo).
This will lead to a more robust and transparent situation.
What you can do if data appear wrongly in the xwho service
is the following:
- Check whether the data are correct in
xuserinfo (yourself), userreg (via your group
administrator) or the HR database (via your secretary).
- If not,
ask for the change, or do it yourself.
If the change is not effective the day after, the problem may be with
the extract and display part of xwho.
In this case, please wait for an additional day (to allow for
failures of the complex updating chain) before you complain to:
xwho.service@cern.ch.
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