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:

In addition, supervisors should use WebINQUIR to:

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/