Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Alan Rothenbush <>]

I have some (likely very basic) Grouper questions, if I may, way down at the 
bottom of this message.


By way of background, our institution has a Grouper install that's central to 
our overall account management service.  

That service includes an in-house developed account management system (that 
takes input from all the usual sources .. Student Services, Human Resources, 
Grad Studies, etc. .. and provides a unified computing account), an LDAP 
service, Active Directory and a legacy "Maillist" application.

Grouper is at the heart of all these systems, with Grouper reading and/or 
writing to them all, and several reading and/or writing Grouper; a bit of a 
tangled web.

Two people support this system .. or perhaps more accurately, supported this 
system.  The secondary left a year or so ago, and the university, in its 
infinite wisdom, never did get around to posting for a replacement.

This nervous situation became critical recently when the truly brilliant 
fellow who put all this together also left the university, rather suddenly, 
and is completely unavailable to us for support.  

Grouper support has therefore fallen to me, for no other reason than I was a 
bit late to the emergency meeting to figure out what we would do about it.

We do have documentation, a decent amount of it, but the documentation 
assumes that the reader already knows all about Grouper and "here's the 
source code for what we did to customize it."

Well, I can SPELL "Grouper", but there my knowledge ends, making this 
documentation limited in its usefulness to me.

So I've been reading and peeking through code and directories and ReadMes and 
FAQs, but still find myself a bit overwhelmed.  I _was_ able to get the logs 
sent to me, only to learn that one of them has the bad word "error" in it.

Time to ask for help, and perhaps the answer to a couple of basic questions 
might just get me started.

The "Grouper daily report" log lists a number of

  LOADER JOBS SUCCESS

but somewhat worryingly, a number of 

  LOADER JOBS WITH NON-SUCCESS

events.  One such "NON-SUCCESS" event looks like

  job:               
SQL_GROUP_LIST__course:loader:1161:studentGroups__a8715228ec084836a1b27a652b6e961e
  status:            ERROR, started: 2015-11-07 04:05:00.0 (107ms)
  ins/upd/del/tot:   0/0/0/0
  error:             null


For those patient enough to have read this far, here finally are my questions.

1.  How are the details of these tasks examined?  I assume they're actually 
stored in the database, but writing a SQL query against tables of unknown 
name in an unknown schema to retrieve the details seems .. troublesome.  

2.  These tasks are obviously run through some sort of CRON job, but I cannot 
determine WHERE; CRON itself does not seem to be running them.   Where is 
Grouper's "crontab"?


I'm hopeful that the answers to these questions might give a different angle 
of attack, as my current plan isn't working.


Thanks in advance for any thoughts or suggestions.


Alan

-- 
Alan Rothenbush                       
IT Services
Simon Fraser University

  There is NOTHING -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing 
  as simply messing about in boats.