Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Shilen Patel <>]

That could have happened if you have composites that are factors of other composites.  There may be other reasons too though.  FWIW, the daemon in 2.3 is designed to take that into account and runs multiple times until all the issues are corrected.

- Shilen 

Sent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone

-------- Original message --------

From: Dave Churchley <>

Date: 10/20/17 10:12 AM (GMT-05:00)

To: Shilen Patel <>

Cc:

Subject: RE: [grouper-users] Composite group problems

Yes, that makes sense. I’ve now scheduled the Bad Membership Finder Utility to run each morning, just after the Grouper loader groups are populated.

 

One more question, if you don’t mind, do you know why it took four goes to fix all the bad memberships this morning? Each time I ran it, it fixed the majority that it had found, but not all of them.

 

Thanks
Dave

 

From: [mailto:] On Behalf Of Shilen Patel
Sent: 20 October 2017 11:46
To: Dave Churchley <>
Cc:
Subject: Re: [grouper-users] Composite group problems

 

OK cool.  The scenario you described is a similar situation where you probably have two threads running at the same time that deleted and added the user from/to the groups under Group B.  The thread that deleted the user from the group under B would have thought the user wasn't an effective member of B anymore and would have deleted the user from A.  Meanwhile the thread that added the user to the group under B would have seen that the user is already in A (since the other transaction may not have committed yet) and therefore wouldn't have done anything else.  Does that at least explain the issue?  We created the bad membership daemon in 2.3 because of this issue but we may need to handle it better.

 

Thanks!

 

- Shilen 

 

 

 

Sent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Dave Churchley <>

Date: 10/20/17 1:28 AM (GMT-08:00)

To: Shilen Patel <>

Cc:

Subject: RE: [grouper-users] Composite group problems

 

Thanks again Shilen

 

The Bad Membership Finder Utility cleaned up 118 bad memberships this morning. (I had to run it four times though until it found no membership errors.) I’m sure this utility will be useful to us!

 

I don’t know if you’re able to explain why the composite group memberships go wrong as in the example below?

 

Thanks
Dave

 

From: [] On Behalf Of Dave Churchley
Sent: 19 October 2017 20:56
To: Shilen Patel <>
Cc:
Subject: Re: [grouper-users] Composite group problems

 

Thanks Shilen, I'll take a look at that in the morning.

 

For at least one of the problem groups, however, this is definitely not the issue. Group A is made up of Group B complement Group C. Person X was in B and not C and so he rightly appeared in A. Two days ago he dropped out of A but he remained in B and not in C. Those groups' memberships hadn't changed. We did notice that Group B was built from several Grouper loader groups and Person X had moved from one of them into another, but this meant that he was still a member of B.

 

I hope I've managed to explain that!

 

Thanks

Dave

 

---

From: Shilen Patel <>
Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2017 6:50:14 PM
To: Dave Churchley
Cc:
Subject: Re: [grouper-users] Composite group problems

 

If both factors in the composite are being updated at about the same time for the same subject, then a membership may be missed.  For example, if Group A is an intersection of Group B and Group C and you add the same person to B and C at almost the same time, then due to the way the database transactions work, the composite membership may not be added to Group A.  Does that seem like the problem you’re having?

If so, this can be corrected using bad membership finder.  You can automatically run it (e.g. every hour) using a built-in daemon though that’s only available in 2.3.  Prior to 2.3, it can be run manually.

https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/Grouper/Bad+Membership+Finder+Utility

- Shilen

On 10/19/17, 11:56 AM, "" <> wrote:

    Good afternoon
   
    We've been using composite groups for a few years now, mainly using the complement operation with exclusion groups. Since the summer, we've also had a few intersection groups.
   
    We've not noticed any problems with group memberships until a couple of weeks ago. (That's not to say there definitely weren't any issues, but there certainly was not a noticeable impact.) At first it was just with the intersection groups but today we've seen it with a complement group, too.
   
    It looks like the composite isn't calculating its membership correctly. Editing the composite and resaving it forces it to recalculate the membership. We've been using this as a workaround but it's obviously not ideal. Some of these composite groups are critical to access control for various systems across the University, including physical access into buildings.
   
    Is this a known issue? Is there anything we can do about it? We're running Grouper v2.2.2. Is there a patch or a better workaround?
   
    Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is a big issue for us at the moment.
   
    Thanks in advance.
   
    Dave Churchley
    Newcastle University