System Administration

How Subversion is set up on openEHR

Overview

This section describes server-side administration of the Subversion repositories. In general these tasks will only be done by openEHR.org administrators at UCL in London, where the server is located.

Authentication

Authentication (i.e. identifying yourself to a server by login or similar means) is currently managed using Apache "basic" authentication, i.e. via login/password, where MD5-encrypted passwords are stored on the server. Any user can changed his/her own password by using the htpasswd command on their own platform with the following command line:

    htpasswd -m my_password.txt firstname.lastname

This will create a one-line file containing an MD5-encrypted password entry for the user firstname.lastname. This file needs to be sent to the team leader or the openEHR Subversion administrator. Note that all users are identified in openEHR Subversion repositories using the firstname.lastname form of id.

Access Control

Access is controlled by the Subversion mod_authz_svn Apache module, and a Subversion access control file which provides access to each repository on the basis of groups, whose members are defined as per the relevant project home page. To be added to the team for a project, please contact the project leader, whose email will be visible in the project home page.

Backups

Backing up is carried out automatically by a wrapper script for the hotbackup.py script that comes with Subversion; the resulting files are copied every night to a separate network backup machine, from which tapes are made daily.