This procedure should be considered draft/incomplete while this line is here

Written by Neil Brown and Lindsey Brown 11/07/2003

archiving.html,v 1.18 2008/03/07 12:30:20 lmb Exp

The Policy for Account Archiving

Before an account is removed from the system it should be archived to some offline storage for posterity. This frees up live resources for other users, but allows us to reinstate the account later should it be necessary.

Currently there is no archival of users except via the tape that JCMB/BP backup group removes from their tape libraries for this purpose. AI has historical archives of users that existed in the .dai domain and these were saved from the South Bridge fire and so are still in existance for reference.

Current policy seems to be the following (see end^* for references):

• Accounts are locked three months after the owner has left Informatics, exceptions are:
  • Common sense (eg account owner will be back in four months),
  • The account is sponsored (see database field) and has been verified current in the last year.
• If the user has been removed from LDAP, then their mailfiles on the mail server should be moved to their home directory so that they will be included on the archive tape, along with their files.
• Accounts are removed from the system two months after locking.
• Archives are maintained by taking a backup tape out of the tap library once a year - doesn't this mean all data after the tape but before account removal is lost?

TODO: We need to propose the timescales for things like how long after graduation an account is active, before becoming disabled and finally archived and removed.

We are leaving student accounts active until:

• for undergrads -- until the September after graduation.
• for msc students -- until the January after graduation.

Staff and postgrad accounts are still being archived on an adhoc basis. We probably also need a policy for visitor accounts.

Suggestion: We set aside a large partition to move accounts that we want archived into. They can then sit there statically until we flush the partition to tape and label and store it appropriately. Some AMT tool to automate the moving of the files. For example it could/should collate any homepages space or mail files.

On sphinx ptn121 and ptn140 have been set aside for disabled accounts awaiting archiving. These accounts have had their ldap entry updated to reflect this move but the directories have been renamed uun-archive and so are unavailable to the user.

The following scripts are now available to perform the various steps of this process.

/usr/sbin/external_accounts       lists non Informatics students -- these are deleted not archived
/usr/sbin/old_accounts            lists Informatics staff and students -- these are archived
/usr/sbin/warn_account_deletion   sends mail to list of uuns

/usr/local/sbin/archive-rsync                      uses the least full of the archiving partitions
/usr/local/sbin/archive-rsync-ptn -p /disk/ptn140  gives the choice of archiving partitions
/usr/local/sbin/archive-tape-write
/usr/local/sbin/archive-tape-access

Note, that not just disabled accounts will be archived. For example, all 4th year accounts should be archived at graduation, regradless of whether some will be returning to do a PhD, etc.

^* References:

• RT Ticket 2506
• Account Management Documentation
• Working practice within .dcs
• Tim, Chris and Neil for things mentioned in the past that helped me remove a user this week (2003/07/10)

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