Multi-user BitCurator

[Andrew Berger]

Hi,

I'm curious to know if anyone has tried running BitCurator as a multi-user environment rather than having everyone share the bcadmin account. At first glance, it looks like most of the applications are installed for all users, but some of the supplied scripts appear to work only from the provided bcadmin desktop.

Thanks,

Andrew

[Kam Woods]

Andrew,

This question has been brought up on the forum before, and the answer is probably worth revisiting. In short: we've made a concerted and ongoing effort to ensure that BitCurator includes tools (and, increasingly, *only* those tools) that can be (and are from the outset) installed for all users.

Nevertheless, there are some "look-and-feel" and interactivity issues (such as the background, icons on the desktop - which themselves link to specific launchers, but aren't otherwise linked to the bcadmin user) which aren't replicated when creating a new user using the supplied Ubuntu useradd tool, which is why we created a supplementary script that recreates these features for additional users:

https://github.com/BitCurator/bitcurator-distro-adduser

The instructions on that repository should get you started, as long as you're comfortable running the appropriate commands in a terminal. If you run into issues or problems with the scripts, please feel free to submit pull requests or bug reports as needed.

Notably, we've recently removed some (but not all) tools that don't have multi-user installs (such as FITS) in our effort to move towards an environment that supports the multi-user use case out of the box. The rationale being, if you need single-user tools, it's simple enough to install them yourself, and doesn't break multi-user installs.

Also, if you have a multi-user at your institutions that uses Kerberos for SSO, the instructions here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/serverguide/kerberos.html

should work fine in Ubuntu 16.04 / BitCurator 1.7.*. You *must* explicitly add local users for anyone who will be using the system, but once that is done and your Kerberos realm has been appropriately configured (may differ depending on your institution, so I can't really link instructions here), users will be able to user their institutional credentials to sign in to the box. I could add a page to the wiki that provides some more detail on this, if that would be useful.

Hope this is helpful. We've added some documentation and clarification on how the BitCurator environment (and other BitCurator-produced tools) are organized and built recently at https://bitcurator.github.io/.

Kam

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[Andrew Berger]

Thanks, Kam. We are giving this a try. We've decided to run the machine off the main network, so we're just creating additional local users.

Andrew

On Monday, November 28, 2016 at 6:46:07 PM UTC-8, Kam Woods wrote:

Andrew,

This question has been brought up on the forum before, and the answer is probably worth revisiting. In short: we've made a concerted and ongoing effort to ensure that BitCurator includes tools (and, increasingly, *only* those tools) that can be (and are from the outset) installed for all users.

Nevertheless, there are some "look-and-feel" and interactivity issues (such as the background, icons on the desktop - which themselves link to specific launchers, but aren't otherwise linked to the bcadmin user) which aren't replicated when creating a new user using the supplied Ubuntu useradd tool, which is why we created a supplementary script that recreates these features for additional users:

https://github.com/BitCurator/bitcurator-distro-adduser

The instructions on that repository should get you started, as long as you're comfortable running the appropriate commands in a terminal. If you run into issues or problems with the scripts, please feel free to submit pull requests or bug reports as needed.

Notably, we've recently removed some (but not all) tools that don't have multi-user installs (such as FITS) in our effort to move towards an environment that supports the multi-user use case out of the box. The rationale being, if you need single-user tools, it's simple enough to install them yourself, and doesn't break multi-user installs.

Also, if you have a multi-user at your institutions that uses Kerberos for SSO, the instructions here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/serverguide/kerberos.html

should work fine in Ubuntu 16.04 / BitCurator 1.7.*. You *must* explicitly add local users for anyone who will be using the system, but once that is done and your Kerberos realm has been appropriately configured (may differ depending on your institution, so I can't really link instructions here), users will be able to user their institutional credentials to sign in to the box. I could add a page to the wiki that provides some more detail on this, if that would be useful.

Hope this is helpful. We've added some documentation and clarification on how the BitCurator environment (and other BitCurator-produced tools) are organized and built recently at https://bitcurator.github.io/.

Kam

On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 9:24 PM, Andrew Berger <andrew...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I'm curious to know if anyone has tried running BitCurator as a multi-user environment rather than having everyone share the bcadmin account. At first glance, it looks like most of the applications are installed for all users, but some of the supplied scripts appear to work only from the provided bcadmin desktop.

Thanks,

Andrew

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[Kam Woods]

Ok, great. Feel free to post further questions here, or open issues / submit patches on GitHub if you run into problems.

Kam

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