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Phone
and xwho
- ImprovedBernd Pollermann , IT/User Support
A couple of changes and real improvements have been introduced
phone
commandhttp://consult.cern.ch/xwho
,While this article might be of general interest to all users, it
is essential for those who use the phone
command from programs or in cronjobs
!
Here a summary of what was done:
'-loginid'
ccid
search
phone
command is running in a new
server
consult/xwho
and the phone
command
has been speeded up considerably, by making the code more efficient
and running the update in a more powerful machine (Linux).
You can now expect the update to have finished between 5:30 and 6:00 each morning.
consult/xwho
and
the phone
command have been moved to local
files of the server. This will guarantee fast and undisturbed
access to the data, even during periods of AFS problems.
'-loginid'
Up to now it was necessary to specify the name of the platform
(-afs, -novell
or -otheraccount
) to find
a person by his/her loginid. From now on one only needs to specify
the "generic" term -loginid
.
Example: Instead of
phone -afs wcncron
or phone
-novell spmail
you can use now
phone -loginid wcncron
or phone
-loginid spmail
with wcncron
or spmail
existing on at
least one platform. As usual -loginid
can be
abbreviated to -log
, i.e. the first three letters.
Important note: For backward compatibility the parameters
-afs, -novell
or -otheraccount
will still
work, but will be removed from the phone
command on the 26th January of 2000.
Background information: In the past one could have found
cases in which two persons have the same login-id on different
platforms, for example: user A had 'myown'
on AFS,
whereas person B had the same login-id, i.e. 'myown'
on NOVELL. Such cases are not possible anymore and a login-id on
its own, i.e. without having to know on which platform it exists,
determines unambiguously the owner. For this reason it had become
desirable to simplify the list of tags of the
phone
command. At the same time it was possible to also
reduce the number of fields in xwho
top page,
i.e.
http://consult.cern.ch/xwho
.
'-mail'
it is now possible to find with
the phone
command the owner of an e-mail
address. This will work under the condition that the address is
either a valid physical e-mail (PEM) or generic e-mail (GEM).
Example:
phone -mail cremel@mail.cern.ch
or
phone -mail Nicole.Cremel@cern.ch
will find in an unambiguous way the owner of this address. As
usual, the search is not case sensitive, and, in the case of
'@cern.ch'
the node name can be omitted.
Important note: Although many forms of mail addresses
other than the correctly spelt PEM or GEM may work, in the sense
that mail sent to them will arrive, phone -mail
will
not work for those. The main application of the
'-mail'
would be therefore
One could envisage a program which "does its best" to
read in a list of mail addresses and produces a list with the
recommended, or correct(ed) version. However, this would not be
done within the phone
command itself, but in an
extra version of it.
In case you have need for such a program, please address this point to the author.
Instead of dd-Mmm-yy
it is now
dd-Mmm-yyyy
.
This is relevant only for users who analyze the output of the
phone
command with the parameter
'-ACCOUNT'
.
ccid
search
ccid
gave either trouble to the server, or returned the
person who had the next ccid
following the
non-existing one.
This is now fixed: Whenever the ccid
is
wrong or doesn't exist you get an error message.
phone
command running in a new server
For matters related to this article please contact the author.
Cnl.Editor@cern.ch