INQUIR
CSAIL’s user database, INQUIR
INQUIR is the central CSAIL user account database. CSAIL users can update their account data (and those of any supervisees) using WebINQUIR (CSAIL Login required).
Note: HQ’s database of CSAIL members, Peeps, is currently managed separately. Current members are listed at https://www.csail.mit.edu/people . Please consult CSAIL HQ’s HR staff if modifications are necessary.
Functionality
Through WebINQUIR, users may:
- edit their own data – including shell, phone number, office location, PGP key
- search for users by name
In addition, supervisors should use WebINQUIR to:
- approve new account requests
- renew expiring accounts
- edit supervisees’ data – including Relation (Undergraduate/Graduate Student, …)
All actions are logged; audit trails are mailed to supervisors and other administrators every 5 minutes.
Technical background
INQUIR is currently implemented as a PostgreSQL database though its history dates back through many incarnations to at least the days of ITS on DEC PDP-6 and PDP-10 systems.
It is used to map people to user-names, UIDs and groups as well as being
authoritative for email forwarding and homepage URL so that
http://www.csail.mit.edu/~YourUserName will be directed to the website
of your choosing which could be a CSAIL hosted personal page or any
other website of your choosing.
You can view your inquir entry from a Unix system such as the CSAIL
login server by typing whois -h inquir.csail.mit.edu <username> at
the command prompt. You can also finger <username>@csail.mit.edu
History
The original INQUIR was written by PDP-10 hackers in the late 1970s for
managing user accounts on our ITS and TOPS-20 machines. The second
version was written some time in the late 1980s by LCS staff as the
PDP-10s were being replaced by VAXen running 4.3BSD; this version was
ported to SunOS by Net Daemons Associates around 1991. Garrett Wollman
wrote the third version in 1999 as a part of Y2K preparedness (and also
to speed along the demise of Kerberos v4 authentication, which the old
VAX/Sun program and its Emacs-based user interface used); it was the
first to have a relational-database back-end, and its user interface was
primarily written in Perl. INQUIR 3.0 accumulated numerous ad-hoc CGI
hacks over the years to provide some level of Web accessibility, but the
primary user interface remained a crufty old Perl script, inquir-cui.
The current implementation maintains the same database back-end as its
predecessor, with a few small schema changes, but replaces the existing
moldering scripts with a new http://rubyonrails.org/