Kelly, Yes, the block allocation is assigned to a user group, so the students must belong to that group. In order for the students to be assigned to the group, their accounts must already exist in the database.
Rather than wait for the students to login to the VCL, what I do is have the faculty member send me a list of student ids for the class. I'll run a quick check to see if any are not already in the database. For ones that aren't, I run a script that inserts them into the database. I create a file of the format: userid firstname lastname emailaddress Then I feed this to a script which runs the insert: echo "insert into user (unityid, affiliationid, firstname, lastname, email, emailnotices,\ lastupdated) values ('$1', 2, '$2', '$3', '$4', 1, now());" | mysql vcl To easily add the users to a group for the block allocation, I use a neat script called managegroups.py provided on the VCL site at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/VCL/managegroups.py+-+Remotely+managing+user+groups . Again, this can take a file as input, with the format: userid@affiliation So I run a command like: managegroups.py addUsersToGroup -n myclassgroup -a Local -f myclasslist The Block Allocation menu is a recently added feature which I think makes it a lot easier now for faculty to request block allocations. They can fill in the form which provides all the necessary information to setup the request, and by simply clicking accept, the block request is actually created, I no longer have to do that separately. There are also nice statistics for the admin both on the Block Allocations page and the Dashboard to view whether there were any failures in provisioning the machines for the request, and how many are actually being used. I hope this helps. Mike Waldron Systems Specialist ITS Research Computing University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill CB #3420, ITS Manning, Rm 2509 919-962-9778 ________________________________ From: Kelly Patrice Robinson [krobinso...@gsu.edu] Sent: Friday, August 19, 2011 9:55 AM To: vcl-user@incubator.apache.org Subject: Block Allocation Is there documentation on how the Block Allocation works? I've been searching the Apache site and haven't been able to find anything that describes the process. If a faculty member (or any user) wants to use block allocation will they need to create a user group and assign their students to that particular group in order to allow access to the images that are part of the reservation? If this is the case, does this mean that the students will need to login first, before the faculty member can assign them to their group? Kelly Georgia State University