15 User Management

The User Management functions allow an administrator to:

Create or Remove Users
Select Groups a user belongs to
Quickly search Users by several criteria
Bulk import/export Users

The users must exist in the authentication database (NIS, LDAP, /etc/passwd etc) used by CVS server. The User management function allows administrator to specify licensed users who can access CVS repository via the WANdisco for CVS Enterprise Edition. Even if you are not using security features like ACL, you must register the valid users with the WANdisco for CVS Enterprise Edition.

If a CVS user has not been registered and they try to access WANdisco for CVS Enterprise Edition configured with an unlimited user license, they will see an error message as below:

cvs acl: Access Denied: The CVS administrator has not granted
cvs acl: you sufficient permissions to execute this command.
cvs acl: Please contact your local CVS administrator for help.
cvs acl: Aborting the cvs operation.

With a limited user license the above error message changes to:

cvs acl: Access Denied: The CVS administrator has not registered
cvs acl: you as a user of WANdisco CVS Replicator.
cvs acl: Please contact your CVS administrator for help.
cvs acl: Aborting the cvs operation.

15.1 Creating or removing users

To add a new user, click on the Create User option in the security menu and specify a login id (cvs user name). The last and first name can contain any character including white-space, there are no restrictions. You can specify an optional email address for the user. The user id is the primary key into the user database, it can not be changed. If you need to change it just delete the user and add a new one with a different user id. The WANdisco for CVS Enterprise Edition tracks the creation and modification time-stamp on the users automatically.

Image edit_user

To remove a user, just click on "Delete" button in the Edit User page. You can also delete multiple users from the User List page.

15.1.1 Sub-Group Assignment

The user can be assigned to any number of checked groups. To de-assign, uncheck the checkbox and click 'Save Details'. Note by selecting a group, the user is automatically assigned to the group and all its sub-groups. Clicking on the icon e will allow you to edit the specific group.

15.2 List and Search Users

To get a list of all the registered users, just click on the User List option. The user list page shows all the users by default. The page size by default is set to show 25 users per page. You can change that by selecting the page size on the upper right corner. The page control on the left corner allow you to go to next or previous page.

If you want to locate a user by first or last name quickly, just start typing the name in the User name like textbox and an incremental search starts automatically. To get the full list back just hit the backspace button on the keyboard till you have deleted all the characters you typed in the textbox.

All the columns in the user list are enabled for sorting. By clicking on the column header you can sort the list in ascending or descending order. The sortable columns include: CVS user id, last name, first name, email, last modified date.

To restrict the list by a group or role, just select a group name from the drop down menu. To see users in the selected group as well as all the ancestor groups click the Inherited Users checkbox.

You can click on the user id hyperlink to edit the user. Mass delete action is supported via selecting the checkbox in the table header (next to User Login id column) and then clicking the delete button.

15.3 Bulk import/export users

In order to import users from other databases like NIS, etc/passwd you can have a script create a comma separated import file with all relevant users. The data to be imported must be in a text file with comma separated fields. The syntax of a user row in the csv file is:

cvsuserid,lastName,firstName[[,email],group1[,group2..groupN]]

Here is an example of a csv file:

> cat userlist.csv
ravi,Shastri,Ravi,ravi@email.com,Admin,sc-engr
rchen,Chen,Roger,rchen@email.com,engr
sony,Richards,Sony,Admin,engr
vanu,Xandau,Vanu

Line 1: Will import a cvs user ravi with last name Shastri, first name Ravi, email address ravi@email.com and assign him groups: Admin and sc-engr.

Line 2: Will import a cvs user rchen with last name Chen, first name Roger, email address rchen@email.com and assign him group: engr.

Line 3: Will import a cvs user sony with last name Richards, first name Sony, no email address and assign him groups: Admin and engr.

Line 4: Will import a cvs user vanu with last name Xandau, first name Vany, no email address and no groups.

The cvs user id, last and first name are required and can not be empty. The email and group names are optional. Further if a group name is specified, the group must already exists in the WANdisco for CVS Enterprise Edition group database, if not the user will not be added. If the 4th field contains the character "@" it is presumed to be an email address.

The path to the CSV file must be accessible by the WANdisco for CVS Enterprise Edition server process. Before doing the import make sure the csv file is either copied on the WANdisco for CVS Enterprise Edition machine or NFS/Samba accessible to the WANdisco for CVS Enterprise Edition process.