Lifecycle management of accounts (draft notes)

[1:59 pm] Zain Rahmat FYI: While classifying accounts and home directories as part of the project to eventually move homes into the cloud, I was reminded that we have a large number of old accounts in the new/old UDB that are in transit (In fact I remember Philip Rodwell telling me this a while ago, and asking why they hadn't been removed). I have run an old script written a while ago to purge accounts in transit more than 8 years old (/home/ss/accounts/bin/transit purge 8), and have managed to purge in excess of 17000 expired and transited accounts from the system. I started small, purging accounts more than 15 years old, then 14, 13, etc to make sure that nothing broke, and as nothing did I took it down to purging transited accounts 8 years and older. Note: None of these old accounts had any home directories still around....

[2:05 pm] Philip Rodwell For reference: CSE account home-folders, associated with expired accounts, are purged from disk after 2yrs (>730-days)

[3:23 pm] Zain Rahmat No. The purging of the old UDB used to happen automagically (with the emphasis on magic). It has not worked properly for a loooong while as far as I can tell, which is why I wrote the transit script all that time ago. We haven't got an equivalent (and better documented) system for the new UDB because we are still depending on synchronizing against the old UDB, but I expect that the regular purging of the new UDB should be a simple matter to set up and cronify once we have gotten rid of the old stuff...