bash script for acknowledging of login messages & logging acceptance.
Communicates changes to login users and makes sure users have acknowledged these changes, putting the onus on the user to deal with any impact on their work.
MBB runs clusters for scientific research, supporting AAFC and other scientists in their research. The software on the Rocks cluster frequently needs to be upgraded to new versions.
New versions of software can produce different results than earlier versions, given the same inputs. This might be problematic if the upgrade occurs in mid-analysis.
In order to mitigate the issues around upgrades and other system changes, acceptor introduces a mechanism to inform the user that software has been upgraded, or some other systems change has been implemented, that may impact their work.
The onus is therefor on the researcher to make sure any changes communicated to them through acceptor (messages a login time that need to be acknowledged) do not impact their work, either by using older versions of the software (if available) or contacting systems staff to find another solution (if possible).
/etc/profile.d/ (depends on your distro of Linux: you want the script run at login); should be world executableMESSAGE: string of the important message; automatically split into 80 columnsPROMPT: this is the prompt that asks the question of the user (i.e. "Acknowledge software X is now version 2.4"). string; automatically split into 80 columnsACCEPT: the string the user must type in to complete the acknowledgment . Default: yesLOGFILE: location on filesystem of log file. Must be writable by users. Default: /var/log/acceptor.logThe log file format:
date-time|userid|message-with-line-feeds-removed