The accounts team handle the day-to-day account requests sent to 'accounts@gnome.org'. Many of the accounts team members are also members of the SysadminTeam, but this is not a requirement. The requests are tracked by the RequestTracker.

Current team members

People that were members or were used to help in the past:

What an accounts team member does

Members of the accounts team will periodically login to the request tracker and go through the tickets in the 'Accounts' queue. They will handle most tickets by either requesting approval or authentication from somebody, or by using the Mango interface to action the request in the GNOME LDAP user directory.

The requests that the team deal with generally fit into one of the following categories:

What we were used to do in the past:

Optionally, team members will hang out on #sysadmin so they can ask questions if they don't know what to do, and to respond to people who come to ping for a quick turnaround on their account request.

New accounts requests

  1. Check for approval from the module maintainer or translation team coordinator in question that they have approved the requestor for a GIT account.
    • Make sure that an auth token is used for that, and that it is only sent to the e-mail address of the module maintainer/translation coordinator there is on record, *not* to the requestor, as the From: header can be easily forged. We should really think of a better way than this, but for now...

    • If the requestor is already listed in an AUTHORS or MAINTAINERS file in GNOME GIT, consider them pre-approved.

  2. Make sure that the requested account name fulfills the requirements in the AccountNameFAQ.

Updating personal details

(TODO) Discuss the checks and process for updating personal information (e.g. in Mango).

Updating SSH keys

  1. Check for authenticity of request by sending an auth token to the e-mail address on record. Do this via the "Send Authorization Token" button on that user's mango page. Have the user respond to their original request with the auth token.

Adding shell access for FTP uploads

  1. Just give the account the 'FTP upload' group perm in Mango.

E-mail address request changes

  1. If it's because the address currently registered is no longer accessible, we would normally check recent ChangeLog commits for that account to see what e-mail address they are using. If it's the same as the new address being requested we will then update the user ID with the updated address. (best practice when asking to update an email address is to answer to the token we gonna send you to the old address available on our Mango database when we first created a specific UID)

Account re-activation requests

Note: SVN accounts got migrated into GIT ones already, so users having an old svn access shouldn't have specific problems in having their accounts active again (apart from renewing their SSH key if lost or different from the old one registered in Mango for their UIDs)

When someone used to have pserver access before the SSH switch, but haven't supplied an SSH key:

  1. Use either viewvc or the newer GIT interfaces to see if they've made any commits in the last two years. If not, refer them to new accounts request procedure as they will need to re-qualify their need for a write-access account. Usually, these people commit infrequently enough that they could get by with a read-only account filing their patches appropriately.

Setting up cool '@gnome.org' aliases

  1. Check they're foundation members first. The most reliable, updated and easily accessible list published by the Membership Committee is on http://foundation.gnome.org/membership/members.php

  2. Set the 'cool @gnome.org alias' flag on the account in Mango. This will trigger a new entry in the aliases file on the next hour.
  3. Send them a 'gnome.org e-mail alias usage guidelines' template. (this is now done by Mango automatically)

Blogs.gnome.org requests

Note: blogs are not created manually anymore, now there is a web form to fill in and a script will automatically set it up for us. Be sure to read NewBlogRequest before applying for a new blog.

  1. Check they have a SVN account
  2. Log in to window
  3. Sudo to blog
  4. ~/NewsBruiser/create-new-blog $SVN_ACCOUNT_NAME

The script will generate a password (possible to change it though).

AccountsTeam (last edited 2011-06-02 21:53:19 by AndreaVeri)