Academic allocations

Most academic allocations are defined and stored in the text files:

/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/YYSS.db (where YY:year SS:Term).

These files are maintained and administered primarily by Andrew Taylor and John Shephard.

The following are the allocations in /home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/ to lecture in COMP9517 in the various terms in 2022, 2023, 2024:

# grep COMP9517 /home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/2[234]*.db | grep L
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/22T1.db:#COMP9517:::_XXX_:LIC+4L::T2,T3
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/22T2.db:COMP9517:::z3447594:LIC+3L::
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/22T2.db:COMP9517:::z3535402:1L::
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/22T3.db:COMP9517:::z3447594:LIC+3L::
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/22T3.db:COMP9517:::ysong:1L::
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/23T1.db:#COMP9517:::_XXX_:LIC+36L::T2,T3
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/23T2.db:COMP9517:::z3447594:LIC+18L::
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/23T2.db:COMP9517:::z3535402:18L::
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/23T3.db:COMP9517:::z3447594:LIC+20L::
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/23T3.db:COMP9517:::ysong:8L::
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/23T3.db:COMP9517:::z3534407:8L::
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/24T1.db:#COMP9517:::_XXX_:LIC+36L::T2,T3
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/24T2.db:COMP9517:::z3447594:LIC+18L::
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/24T2.db:COMP9517:::z3535402:18L::
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/24T3.db:COMP9517:::z3447594:LIC+20L::
/home/teachadmin/public_html/alloc/24T3.db:COMP9517:::z3534407:16L::

These files are read nightly by our system scripts to allocate users to academic course classes (like COMP9517_Lecturer, or COMP9517_Supervisor) in the UDB (CSE's User Database the contents of which are displayed and modified by the acc command)

Users are generally assigned membership start and expiry dates for each academic course class, depending on the year/term to which they have been assigned, and the type of academic allocation being made (i.e. whether Lecturer, Supervisor, Coordinator, Tutor or Demonstrator).

By default:

1. Lecturer and Coordinator course memberships start one year before the start of the allocated year/term and expire one year and 2 weeks after the end of the actual allocated session/term,
2. Supervisors start 6 weeks before the start of the allocated year/term, and expire two weeks after the start of the next session/term,
3. Tutors and Demonstrators start 2 weeks before the start of the allocated year/term, and expire 5 weeks after the end of the year/term.

These different start and expiry dates were defined (by Andrew Taylor and others) to cover the different times that each course role might require for preparation, handover, course development, exam marking, etc. If necessary, these default start and expiry dates can be adjusted manually, but currently only by ss (system support) at the request (generally) of the Lecturer or Coordinator in charge of the course.

The term and session creation, start, end, and expiry dates are defined in the config file:

/home/ss/lib/unsw_dates.config

which is read by:

/home/ss/bin/unsw_dates

and which is used by the system scripts that process course allocations (both academic and student).

Mail lists

The automatic CSE mail alias "UDB_Class-list@cse.unsw.edu.au" addresses all CSE users that are members of the UDB class UDB_Class. So email sent to "COMP9517_Lecturer-list@cse.unsw.edu.au" will go to all members of the UDB class "COMP9517_Lecturer".

You can inspect lists that depend on UDB classes in two ways:

acc UDB_Class/

This inspects the members of UDB_Class directly using acc. By default, this will just list the primary names of all members of this UDB class (both user and non-user members). However, you can also use an acc format assignment to get more specific information.

E.g.:

% acc -U format='$n $[COMP9517_Lecturer] $name' COMP9517_Lecturer/
z3447594 16jun2025 Erik Meijering
z3526538 23sep2024 Yang Song
z3534407 23sep2024 Sonit Singh
z3535402 16jun2025 Dong Gong

This shows only members that are users (-U), and displays the user's login, followed by their expiry date from the class 'COMP9517_Lecturer', and their name.

For more info on acc, see acc -h.

mlalias -Ev UDB_Class-list

In general, the user needs to be a member of "Employee" to expand such lists, and the user will only be shown those final addresses that the user is allowed (by mlalias) to view and expand. If you were a member of the UDB class Employee, and none of the current members of COMP9517_Lecturer had defined any (personal) mail aliases that you could not view, then you could do the following:

% mlalias -Ev COMP9517_lecturer-list
COMP9517_lecturer-list:
  z3447594->erik.meijering@unsw.edu.au
  z3526538->yang.song1@unsw.edu.au
  z3534407->sonit.singh@unsw.edu.au
  z3535402->dong.gong@unsw.edu.au