August 20, 1987
 
      Don,
 
      Here are the error messages currently obtainable from NEW
on the VAX that refer the operator to Production Control.
 
 
      1. Please contact Production Control for assistance. 
 
      This message is issued when the person operating NEW does
not get through one of the dialogs successfully.  There are five
dialogs
 
         a. determine whether the person is a student of faculty/staff
            member
 
         b. obtain the person's last name
 
         c. obtain the person's student number of the last six
            digits of their social security number
 
         d. obtain the person's choice of login name for the  
            account.
 
         e. obtain the person's choice of password for the  
            account.
  
      Each of these dialogs has retry logic that runs through up 
to three repetitions. The checks insure that the information 
obtained is well formed. For example, there are checks to insure 
that there are no commas or other special characters in numbers 
etc. If one of the dialogs fails, the person is assumed to either 
have a bad communications connection that is putting out garbage 
(for example, a terminal set to the wrong baud rate) or to be 
completely confused about what is expected. In either case,
hand holding is indicated.
 
      Of course, the other possibility is something wrong with 
NEW. Ultimately, this message could be changed to send people to 
Consulting. I have everything going to Production Control now 
because I want to closely monitor the problems we run into with 
NEW. 
 
 
      2. The name and number you have entered are not currently 
         in our records.  Please contact Production Control     
         for assistance. 
 
      In this case, the information obtained by the dialogs is 
well formed but the person is not in the files. This could be 
someone who is either not on the enrolment tape because they 
registered late or someone whose name is not spelled in the 
database the way they normally spell it. These people will not be 
able to be added by NEW at all. You will have to add them with 
CDFEDIT. If you get one of these, send me a note with the persons 
name and number on it and and I'll try to figure out what's wrong 
with the data base. We are bound to get a few of these in the 
beginning. 
 
      One major source of these messages is part time student 
employees. These employees are not currently on our staff list. 
So, several of our consultants are in this category. They are not 
on the student tape since they are not in school this quarter and 
they are not on the employee file because it is incomplete. The 
only option, again, is CDFEDIT. 
 
 
      3. NEW is not able to communicate with its server on    
         the  network. Please contact Production Control for 
         assistance. 
 
      Here, the server on Rita has crashed. When this happens, NEW 
will give this message on all VAXes. I do not expect this much but 
it can happen - during PM on Rita for example. In the future we 
will change this message to ask people to try again later. Now it 
says to contact Production Control because, again, I want to know 
how often this happens. The server is new code and may work less 
well than I hope. By having people phone in with these problems we 
will get some idea of the health of the system. 
 
      To get an account up fast in this case CDFEDIT will have 
to be used. CDEFEIT does not, and will not, check the validation 
files. 
 
      4. An account belonging to you already exists and NEW can 
         not create more than one account per person.  If you   
         are having trouble accessing your account, please      
         contact Production Control for assistance.             
 
      Probably, the person having forgotten their password or 
something, has tried to use NEW to recover access to their account. 
There was a degree of capability of this kind in the previous 
version of NEW which is not there in the current version. At any 
rate, if someone comes in with this, the most likely cure will be 
to reset the password in the UAF with AUTHORIZE or however
you currently do it.
 
      Now there is a problem here if the person just does not 
remember their username. Then you can't reset the password because 
you can't find out what account to reset. I am currently working 
on this. I will probably either write a new utility, or add a 
function to CDFEDIT, which can, given a student number or social 
security number, determine the current username. Until this 
function is available, either Tracy or I will have to dig around 
to find out the username. 
 
      5. An account belonging to you already exists but has     
         expired.  To regain access to this account please      
         contact Production Control for assistance.             
 
      This case is similar to the one above except that in this 
case there will be no UAF or CDF records for the account. I think 
that CDFEDIT will recover accounts from this condition - I know 
that ADD does and the old NEW used to. I'll have to talk to Tracy 
a little about this. The goal will be to have CDFEDIT be the 
ultimate account maintenance tool so it should be able to do 
everything including this recovery of expired accounts. In the 
meantime, if this comes up, either Tracy or I will have to recover 
the account manually. Again, this condition is temporary and will 
be resolved asap. 
 
      That's the story on the expected situations. I expect that 
most all problems you get you will be able to fix using CDFEDIT. 
Expecptions to this should be rare but may happen some at first. 
The real problems are likely to be cases in which the software is 
not working as expected. Solving these problems will require 
either Tracy or me to get into the code.