Hey guys, I thought I would throw a quick suggestion in to the mix.  We 
frequently encounter situations where labs hits resource limits because of 
tools consuming space, either by negligence, or the owner disappeared.

Toolserver had remedies to counteract some of this.  Every 6 months, tool 
server users were required to verify that the account was still being used, 
otherwise it would get deactivated.  This allowed for tools that were no longer 
maintained or not being used to not needlessly consume resources.  I would 
propose something similar on tool labs.  

My proposal is that every 6 months tool labs users must confirm their accounts 
as active accounts, maybe with a simple CLI command, confirmaccount.  The users 
get an email reminder, and are reminded on login.  If they fail to comply, the 
web service and all active jobs submitted from the user in the grid, as well as 
all active non-root processes get terminated, and the crontab disabled.  They 
can still login, and confirm their account in which the crontab will be 
restored, as well as all submitted jobs resubmitted, and web service restored.  
If however, the user fails to login 6 months after account deactivation, the 
tool should be considered abandoned, with 1 year no activity, and the tool, 
that is the NFS folder containing it and the MySQL DB, gets deleted and space 
reabsorbed for other services.

Alternatively, activity can be simply confirmed by routinely SSHing into the 
tool while it’s active and the timer automatically resets to 6 months, and with 
6 months of no activity the tool gets deactivated as mentioned above and the 
user is required to run the confirm account command to restore services.  This 
would help with resource usage limits and make it easier for ops I would 
imagine.  With the recently founded committee for taking over abandoned tools, 
tool takeover should be a much smooth process if there is still interest in the 
tools, even with the owner gone.  Thoughts?

Cyberpower678
English Wikipedia Account Creation Team
English Wikipedia Administrator
Global User Renamer

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