Account creation for SR2015

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

Our account management situation has severely improved in recent years
with the use of userman/nemesis. Many man-decades have been saved. While
we're not on fire for next year, I'd like to suggest we should do
account creation for SR2015 _prior_ to Kickstart.

With appropriate scripting, the procedure would be to:
a) Wait for receipt of a signed Team Leader Agreement [0]
b) Run a script registering a team in our LDAP records, with:
- Creation of college-TLA group
- Creation of team-TLA group
- Creation of teacher user in appropriate groups, with appropriate
contact details etc
And that's it.

On the technical side this differs from last years procedure where some
of these things had to be generated manually and sometimes in different
stages. Thanks to Alex Monk for writing a script to simplify that.

The most significant difference though is that people get accounts
before Kickstart. IMO this is not a goal by itself, the point is to not
delay account creation until afterwards. The schools also have something
(admittedly intangible) to show that they're registered.

We should still create kickstart-specific accounts for teams though, as
inevitably someone's going to turn up without their details, or will
have forgotten their password.

I don't think moving account creation up is contentious; The next step
would be to modify the existing createteacheraccount.py script in
userman.git to be a commission-school script, or something, following
the procedure above. Through the power of puppet, it's entirely possible
for someone else to develop this, and it'd be fantastic if someone else
would put the time into it.

[0] Which is totally happening this year, by thick or thin.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

On 03/08/14 17:25, Jeremy Morse wrote:
> Our account management situation has severely improved in recent years
> with the use of userman/nemesis. Many man-decades have been saved. While
> we're not on fire for next year, I'd like to suggest we should do
> account creation for SR2015 _prior_ to Kickstart.
>
> With appropriate scripting, the procedure would be to:
> a) Wait for receipt of a signed Team Leader Agreement [0]
> b) Run a script registering a team in our LDAP records, with:
> - Creation of college-TLA group
> - Creation of team-TLA group
> - Creation of teacher user in appropriate groups, with appropriate
> contact details etc
> And that's it.

Modulo the change in format of the team leader agreement, I'm still
intending on generating accounts for SR2015 before Kickstart. In fact,
I'd like to ship them this week, on Wednesday. This will allow us to
measure school/team participation by the number of competitors who have
been registered.

To my knowledge, before shipping accounts we should:
* Rotate the tickets + MCF keys
* Change the forum-locked message to say that it'll open sometime
around Kickstart
* Nothing else

The IDE remains in maintenance mode, and seeing how there will be some
changes to how code is shipped this year, I don't see any point in
enabling it prior to Kickstart. Opening the forum is out of scope for
srobo-devel.

If there's a reason why account-shipping should be delayed please let me
know in the next 48 hours.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Peter Law]

Jeremy wrote:
> To my knowledge, before shipping accounts we should:

There's a trac page [1] which contains much of this information,
though possibly not in this level of detail. Extending that would be
good.

> * Rotate the tickets + MCF keys
> * Change the forum-locked message to say that it'll open sometime
> around Kickstart
> * Nothing else

If not already done, we should also wipe & re-create the team- and
college- groups in LDAP.

This also seems as good a time as any to clear the IDE repos, settings
and team-status stuff (info and images).

Peter

[1] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/wiki/Competition%20dependant%20jobs

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

On 15/09/14 18:58, Peter Law wrote:
> There's a trac page [1] which contains much of this information,
> though possibly not in this level of detail. Extending that would be
> good.

Fantastic, I'll bake some information on what I do in there,

> This also seems as good a time as any to clear the IDE repos, settings
> and team-status stuff (info and images).

Aha, team status stuff is definitely something I would have missed, cheers.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

I've tested the account creation process (and baked a script, see
userman.git/importschools.py), and tested account creation via
nemesis/userman too. All seems to be working fine.

I've generated 48 teams/accounts for confirmed teams, there are 3 I
haven't interacted with yet (CAT DUL KEL), I'll be dealing with them
tomorrow.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

6 days after accounts started shipping, there are now 50 student
accounts from 10 schools. There are an additional 27 registrations
pending from 6 schools; removing overlap, 12 teams have made at least
one registration.

There's no mechanism for comparing this with previous years because we
haven't done this before.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

There are now 100 registered (+confirmed) student accounts across 16
schools. I don't think we're in a position where we need to provoke the
teams into registering accounts, that can come in say, a weeks time.

Account creation tends to grow across the year; while we ended last year
with something like 400 accounts, I wouldn't expect to have more than
250 or so until after Kickstart, IMHO YMMV.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

3 weeks after shipping accounts, there are now 118 students across 19
teams. As mentioned, there's no way of comparing this with previous years.

I'll be sending a reminder to schools later today, asking for those who
haven't registered users to get in contact if they're having trouble
recruiting, and reminding them about generating accounts.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

Today, there are 159 students across 23 teams.

I've also received an email from a (new) school about getting media
consent forms and tickets done [0]. I've explained we normally launch
that immediately after Kickstart, as I don't have mental space to
wrangle that right now. I do enjoy all these things being way in advance
though.

[0] The ToS/intro document does make it clear that they're only for the
competition.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

Today there are 187 accounts across 25 teams.

I didn't get around to mailing out the reminders before; I've now sent
out a reminder to all schools about Kickstart, and for schools who
haven't created accounts I've pointed out they should do that before
Kickstart.

(I've also said that we'll generate temporary accounts if they don't get
around to doing that in time; I'll take charge of this).

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Murray Colpman]

On 21/10/14 13:41, Jeremy Morse wrote:
>
> (I've also said that we'll generate temporary accounts if they don't
> get around to doing that in time; I'll take charge of this).

Can't they generate accounts for themselves on the day using nemesis, or
is there still a manual element involved?

Murray.

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

On 21/10/14 13:51, Murray Colpman wrote:
> Can't they generate accounts for themselves on the day using nemesis, or
> is there still a manual element involved?

They can, but if they haven't done it by then IMO they'll need some
walking through, which will use up valuable blueshirt time (and nemesis
has ~5 mins delay built into it). Other things that can go wrong include
the teacher forgetting their password and school spam filters triggering
(see an earlier discussion on srobo-devel).

Having some pre-shipped kickstart accounts that get deleted at the end
of the day should ensure we don't have to rely on peoples memories,
email provides, or nemesis for success.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

On 21/10/14 13:41, Jeremy Morse wrote:

> Today there are 187 accounts across 25 teams.

24h after reminders, this is now 241 activate accounts over 32 teams.
Additionally, there are 23 pending registrations, and two schools with
pending registrations but no accounts.

Again, this is no indication as far as we know of whether only 32 / 34
are going to turn up, only that that many have generated accounts.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

Now 283 students across 37 schools.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

Today, 332 students across 41 teams.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

Today there are 437 student accounts across 50 schools. (Clearly the
other schools need chasing, this will happen next week).

--
Thanks,
Jeremy