Re: Automatic sync of Foundation members between foundation's DB and LDAP

[Tobias Mueller <muelli cryptobitch de>]

Hi :)

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 02:27:30PM +0100, Andrea Veri wrote:
> I made a little script that syncs the Foundation members from the 
> Foundation database (hosted on MySQL) to LDAP. LDAP is then binded to 
> the export-mail script that automatically generates new @gnome.org 
> aliases without the need of someone having to create them manually.
Cool!

> 1. How committee members will be able to access the relevant memberUid 
>    from LDAP if they don't have access to LDAP at all? (access is 
>    currently restricted to accounts team + sysadmins)
I think I haven't understood it yet.
Where does Mango write the user information to? There is a "GNOME userid" field
when adding  a new user. Could we use this? If not, could we add another field
to the Mango web interface for the email alias?

> 2. What should be our policy in relation of old members still owning
>    a @gnome.org alias? right now members are only added to the 
>    'mailusers' LDAP group and never removed but we can easily turn 
>    that on and remove an alias in case the membership expired. A 
>    question arises though: most of the times members make use of their
>    alias in many places around the web and breaking it might result
>    in a loss of emails.
Right. That wouldn't be a nice move.
Do we have statistics on the usage of an alias?
I'm not entirely sure whether we want to create such a statistic, but
if we happen to have that information already, we may as well use it determine
what aliases are old and what we can get rid of.
Also interesting would be the number of bounces, I guess.

>    What I'm wondering is how long should we leave
>    the alias around? Also should we remove the alias at all when a 
>    membership lapses? 
Interesting question. I think, yes, we should. An alias is a "benefit"
of the membership. If one is not a member anymore, one is not entitled to
these benefits. On the other hand, such an alias is pretty much for free
for us to provide. And it's not a problem unless a new member want to have
that alias.
So maybe we can do it like this: Once the membership lapses, we send an email
saying that we reserve the right to reclaim the email alias in case a member
wants to have it. We can also mention that we try to claim it with a three month
notice. In any case, we'd appreciate if the alias can be removed.
Is that a too complicated procedure?

Cheers,
  Tobi