[LON-CAPA-admin] RE: Domain coordinator cannot log in after upgrade

[Neubauer, Paul R.]

Hi Stefan and anyone else who might be interested,

>From: Stefan Bisitz <st.bisitz at fh-wolfenbuettel.de>
>Hi Paul,
>
>Some comments which hopefully help a bit:
>
>- User accounts cannot be totally removed in the current LON-CAPA version. 
>Just make sure that nobody can login with the invalid user, e.g. set to 
>internally authenticated and set a random password.

No problem. I've taken care of that.

>- I guess you have consulted
>http://www.loncapa.org/hardwareupgrade.html
>? However, from what you write I assume that you already successfully 
>passed the important steps.

I did read that and incorporated it in my plan, in a slightly modified form.

>- I slightly remember that I also had troubles to login with an 
>already existing DC account after having changed the server hardware, 
>the OS, the IP adress, ... and (nearly) the rest of the world... ;-)

So this may be a more common problem.

>I assume that "normal" users can login, just the DC (domain coordinator) 
>cannot. If so, my suggestions:

That's correct. Normal users can log in but the DC could not.

>a) Create a _new_ DC account with an so far unused user name for your domain. 
>Then log in with this new user and change the password for the _old_ DC account ("bsudc").

I have now done that. I created "dcbsu" in addition to "bsudc"

>b) It is possible that file system authentication is the origin 
>for the issues, but this is the method new DC accounts automatically 
>have. I think you don't need this kind of authentication. In this case, 
>switch the authentication method of your old DC account to 
>internally authenticated and enter a password. This should work.

The new "dcbsu" account was created with filesystem authentication and worked fine. I logged in to the web interface using that account, and searched for my old domain coordinator "bsudc". I then changed its authentication from filesystem to internal and now both DCs work fine. :-)

Of course, this still does not answer the question of why the old DC did not work following the OS upgrade or how to avoid it. (A very important question for anyone who wants to do this in the future, including possibly me.) 

The other obvious remaining question is whatever happened to rolesmanip.pl? The internal documentation in /root/loncapa-2.7.1/loncom/build/make_domain_coordinator.pl indicates that there should be a manual procedure for adding a domain coordinator. When I traced through that manual procedure, I got through the first 8 steps (finding that nothing needed to be done for them) and then tried in vain to find a file called rolesmanip.ip. Not only is it not anywhere under /root/loncapa-2.7.1, but I still have tarballs going all the way back to loncapa-1.3.2.tar.gz and none of them contain a file called rolesmanip.pl. So the question is whether the filename inside make_domain_coordinator.pl is incorrect and I should have been looking for a different filename or whether there is really no manual procedure at all.

Anyway, I've been trying to write up a report on the procedure I used to do the upgrade, including the pitfalls I have encountered. I'd like to include something about this part too. Once I decide that I know as much as I am going to know, I'll submit it to this list.

Best Regards to all,
Paul