Course Dir. Access Mgmt.

Managing Access to the Physics Course Directory Hierarchy

Managing Access to the Physics Courses Directory Hierarchy

General Overview

In an attempt to facilitate the use of computing resources to further the academic goals of the department, the department is making available disk space to the faculty teaching courses in the department. The space is provided by the department upon request, with a reasonable quota (negotiable if special circumstances warrant). The space is intended to allow :

faculty and TA's to make materials available to their students, either publicly over the web or as part of the PNCE filesystem with more restricted access.
faculty and TA's additional workspace for grading, etc., as well as sharing information between them that is not intended for general access.
facilitate electronic submission of student's coursework and/or the return of graded work electronically back to the student.

The course directories are structured in a manner to facilitate the above and similar types of interactions, and more detail about this structure can be found here. However, a common thread in the above applications is the need to determine who should have access to the materials. This page is intended to give faculty and authorized users more detailed information on how to manage the various types of access.

Group Structure

The system controls who can do what or access what based on which AFS/pts groups the user's account belongs to. As it is based on the Kerberos/AFS security system used on the PNCE-Unix/NSCP-II/Glue system, all people involved must have Glue accounts. WAM accounts will NOT work. The Physics department will provide Glue accounts to all faculty and graduate students, and campus should provide accounts to all undergraduates and non-physics graduate students. There is an on-line procedure for obtaining a Glue account. If there are unusual circumstances or problems getting an account, contact PCS and something will be worked out. The following groups are the ones which are relevant for course related functions (note in the following that in all instances of physnnn, you should change the nnn to refer to the specific course you are interested in). Depending on what subset of the functionality provided in these course directories is desired, maintaining proper membership may only be required for some of the groups.

phys:phys-class-mgr : Members of this group (basically PCS and the Chair's office) have the ability to control the membership of all of the phys:physnnn-mgr groups.
phys:physnnn-mgr : This group should contain all the faculty who are teaching the course. Among other things, it controls the membership of the phys:physnnn-ta and phys:physnnn groups. Membership in this group is necessary for faculty to make any use of the directory structure for this course.
phys:physnnn-ta : This groups should contain all the TAs associated with the course. The faculty teaching the course (members of phys:physnnn-mgr) control who is in this group. A proper membership list for this group is required for electronic coursework submission and/or return, to allow TA's access to post stuff on the web site, or to allow TA's access to the restricted areas of the directory space.
phys:physnnn : This group should contain the accounts of all students in the course. Membership in this group is controlled by the faculty teaching the course (i.e. members of phys:physnnn-mgr). All students in the course must be in this group in order to avail oneself of electronic coursework submission and/or return, or to provide a directory of materials readable only by course members. It is NOT necessary if you are only using the web space provided by the course.

Determining which groups you are in

You can verify the group membership of your account with the command:
pts members $USER
This command will work for students as well as faculty and TAs, and indeed is the only command discussed in this page for which this is true. You should see one or more of the groups above listed if you are a member of that group. If you do not see one of the above groups listed, or the wrong one, you should contact PCS or the Chair's office if you are a faculty member, or your professor if you are a TA or student.

NOTE: Please note that not all Physics courses are using this directory structure, so if you are a student or TA please do not complain about lack of membership unless you have reason to believe you should be in the group. The student group in particular might not be used if the course is not doing electronic work submission or restrict file access. Also note that membership in this group is done manually after classes start, and takes a bit of time, and has nothing to do with registration in the course. In particular, you will not be in the group unless your professor has requested Glue email addresses from everyone.

Managing membership of the faculty group phys:phys`nnn`-mgr

This group is maintained by PCS or the chair's office. Faculty who should be in this group but aren't should either contact PCS or the chair's office. Note that if no directory exists yet for the course in /dept/phys/courses, PCS must create one first and should be contacted.

Authorized people in the chair's office can add faculty to the management group for a course using the command:
manage_class_managers physnnn
replacing nnn with the correct course number. More information about the use of that command may be found here. You should probably use the list command to make sure the list of faculty for the class is up to date, and delete faculty left over from the last time it was taught.

When you do this for the first time for the semester for a particular course, it would also be useful if you could delete all the people in the TA list and students list. This can be done with the commands:
manage_class_tas physnnn -empty
and manage_class_students physnnn -empty
respectively.

Managing membership of the TA group phys:phys`nnn`-tas

This group is maintained by the faculty members teaching the course. TA's who should be in this group but aren't should contact the appropriate faculty member about this. Membership in this group might not be necessary if the course is not using electronic work submission, restricted directories, and if you do not need to post stuff to the course web page.

The faculty teaching the course can add TA's for the course using the command:
manage_class_tas physnnn
replacing nnn with the correct course number. More information about the use of that command may be found here. You should probably use the list command to make sure the list of TA's for the course is up to date, and delete TA's left over from the last time it was taught.

NOTE: access controls are currently only available at the resolution of courses, not sections, subsections, etc. within the course. If more than one person is teaching the course, please realize that the TA and class list will contain all TA's and students for all sections of the course, and use some care and show consideration toward your colleagues by checking with them before deleting users you are not familiar with. I.e, when you start entering students for your class, don't just blindly empty the student list unless you know that no other current faculty member has entered their students yet.

In keeping with the above, it might be useful if a faculty member or the chair's office empties the TA list before TA's are assigned, so that you know everyone in the TA list was added during the current semester.

Managing membership of the student group phys:phys`nnn`

This group is maintained by the faculty members teaching the course. Students taking the course who should be in this group but aren't should contact their professor about this. Membership in this group might not be necessary if the course is not using electronic work submission or restricted directories.

The faculty teaching the course can add students for the course using the command:
manage_class_students physnnn
replacing nnn with the correct course number. More information about the use of that command may be found here. You should probably use the list command to make sure the list of students for the course is up to date, and delete students left over from the last time it was taught.

In keeping with the above, it might be useful if a faculty member or the chair's office empties the student list before students are assigned, so that you know everyone in the student list was added during the current semester.

Because accidents can happen, it is strongly advised that after you make any major additions to the list that you make a backup copy of the current members of the list. You can do that with the command:
manage_class_students physnnn -list > myfile.txt
where nnn is the course number and myfile.txt is the name of a file into which to store the backup (the file will be overwritten). There is no user friendly way to restore using that backup, but should something bad happen to the list AND you have those files, PCS can probably get things back working for you rather quickly.

If you are planning to return work to the students electronically, you will need to also run the command:
create_class_return_directories physnnn
to create the directories into which you can return stuff. You must run this again everytime you add someone to the class group (running it multiple times or when not necessary is not problematic, and in particular will not remove anything already returned to the student from that directory). Before the course starts, one of the faculty members should remove all the returned work stuff from the previous semester with the command:
rm -rf /dept/phys/courses/Physnnn/returned_work/*

Although you can use the manage_class_students command to remove students who dropped out of the course, you probably do not need to bother with that unless you are very concerned about their access to files restricted to students in the class. Since students have rather limited rights anyway, you can generally leave them in the phys:physnnn group until the semester ends even if they drop out. All it gives them is the ability to read the files in the course directory which are restricted so that class members can read them (e.g. everything NOT in private, submissions, or returned_work), access to their returned_work directory, and the ability to submit coursework. Of course, if you are concerned, you can remove them as soon as they drop the course.

Use of the manage_class_* suite of scripts

This section describes how to use the various members of the manage_class_* suite of scripts, consisting of:

manage_class_managers : For managing which faculty control the class directory for the course
manage_class_tas : For adding and deleting to the TA list for the course
manage_class_students : For adding and deleting to the student list for the course

NOTE: All of the above scripts only control access rights in the /dept/phys/courses/Physnnn hierarchy, and have absolutely nothing to do with registration, course listings, etc.

All of the above scripts make use of an identical interface, and so are described together. The easist way to use them is in the interactive mode, which is invoked by typing the name of the appropriate script followed by the course number at the shell prompt of any PNCE-Unix machine. E.g.
manage_class_students phys171 to manage students in course Physics 171. You will then get a prompt which indicates which of the three programs you are in. At this prompt, you can issue any of the following commands:

help: This prints a list of all available commands with a brief description.
list: This prints out a list of all members of the appropriate group (e.g. students in Physics 171 from the above example).
add: This command enables you to add users to the appropriate group. After typing this, the script will prompt you for a list of usernames to add to the group. You can enter as many users as you wish on the line, just separate each user with a space and/or comma.
del: This command enables you to delete users from the appropriate group. After typing this, the script will prompt you for a list of usernames to add to the group. You can enter as many users as you wish on the line, just separate each user with a space and/or comma.
empty: This command removes all current users from the group. It is basically the same as a del command, giving the output of the list command when it asks for a list of users, but easier on the fingers. PLEASE USE WITH CARE.
quit: Exits the program.

When the command succeeds, you should get a friendly message saying what it did. Otherwise you should get an error message.

For those of you who wish, there is also a non-interactive mode. All of the commands above except help and quit can be done from the command line by adding the command (preceded immediately with a hyphen) after the course name on the command line. For the add and del commands, you can also add a list of users (separated by spaces) after the command argument. For example:
manage_class_tas phys195 -add bigboote georgeb adds users bigboote and georgeb to the group phys:phys195-tas.

NOTE: In all cases, the Glue accounts must exist before they can be added to any group. Errors will occur otherwise.

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