SquaresDB lives at https://squaresdb.mit.edu/ and is the club's membership database and attendance tracking system. It's unlikely there's much of use on this page unless you're doing administrative stuff of some form.
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Login and Accounts
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In general it's best to use a personal account linked to Google or Touchstone, but for shared devices (in particular, for gate&books) we support password-based accounts. The "signin" account's password (used on the club tablet) is in the Passwords wiki page.
Standard Operations
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Doing gate and books requires a device (smartphone works okay, something with a larger screen like a tablet or laptop is preferable – the club has a tablet) and an account on the site. If working on a personal device, ideally one uses a personal account for improved auditability, but the "signin" account is also available – see prior paragraph "Login and Accounts" section for details to get access. The gate&books pages in SquaresDB themselves have some instructions as do the nightly jobs instructions.
New Subscriptions
Once prices for the subscription period have been decided on
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, you'll need to load them into SquaresDB:
- Go to https://squaresdb.mit.edu/gate/new_period/.
- Enter the first and last dance dates.
- Select the relevant season.
- Time should be correct (assuming the club dance time hasn't changed), and name and slug should populate automatically.
- Change the default price scheme to "normalnormal2023", and fill in the subscription prices.
- Hit create (don't check "confirm").
- Confirm the dates look right, check "confirm", and hit create again.
That should be everything in SquaresDB to create the period. Don't forget to also update Historic Subscription Prices and Squares Pay with the new period, though.
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It has a Discuss archive – you can view it at https://diswww.mit.edu:8443/pergamon.mit.edu/squares-db-errorlog/ (requires certs). View access is occasionally synced to the tech-squraessquares-officers list by running:
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Currently, squaresdb.mit.edu is the same VM as tech-squares-photos.mit.edu. As of September 2024, the following people have admin access: admin:x:115:kchen,vboyce,adehnert,lhuhmann . If something goes wrong with SquaresDB and Alex isn't available to fix it, somebody with admin access to the server has the technical permissions needed to deploy code fixes or gain superuser access within SquaresDB. (Naturally, this should be avoided. Possession of technical permissions doesn't mean they have familiarity with the code such that this will be a smooth process.)
To give somebody shell access, use "adduser $NEWUSER --disabled-password" to create an account for ssh pubkey access, and add a public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. If they need to administer the server, either set a password and add them to the "admin" group so they can use sudo, or add them to root's authorized_keys.
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