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[next article]Over the past few years, the ECN has grown from a collection of large time sharing machines into a large network of over 300 machines. While this growth has provided increased computing power to the users, it has also increased the effort needed to perform standard system administration.
About a year ago, a project was started to provide a mechanism that would simplify system administration. The project was named ACmaint (Account Creation and MAINTenance.) ACmaint was installed on all ECN machines over the summer. For the most part, the conversion is transparent to users.
In order to utilize ACmaint fully, several system utilities were upgraded. They were also equipped with a new flag ( -n ). The "-n" option represents "netwide" and causes a command to affect all of the user's ECN accounts. Commands modified to use the "- n" option are: /bin/passwd, /bin/chsh, /bin/chfn. Without the "- n", commands function as they did before the installation of ACmaint. As an example, to change your password on ALL of your ECN accounts, you would type:
passwd -n Changing passwd for kimery. Old password: New password: Retype new password:
Once in a while, user's may receive an error message when using the modified commands. The message send_packet: timed out. indicates that the ACmaint system is unavailable and you should try the command again later. This should only occur if work is being done to ACmaint itself.
One of the benefits of ACmaint is that it knows how to handle machines that are down. If you issue a command with the "netwide" option and one or more machines are down, ACmaint will change all the machines that are up, and will then wait until the down machines are back up and change them also.
One of the drawbacks to ACmaint is that under heavy load, a delay is introduced between the time a command is issued and the time machines are updated. Under severe load, this delay could be as long as twenty minutes. ACmaint will get to your requests at some point, though.
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