New Subscriptions
Once prices have been set for the subscription period, 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 "normal", 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 Squares Pay with the new period, though.
Shortly before the period starts, you'll want to import the payments. The Squares Pay page has more on how to do that.
Debugging
Django sends error messages to squares-db-errorlog@mit.edu – if you're routinely debugging issues, you probably want to be on it.
It has a Discuss archive – you can view it at https://diswww.mit.edu/pergamon.mit.edu/squares-db-errorlog/ (requires certs). View access is occasionally synced to the tech-squraes-officers list by running:
remctl pergamon discuss set-read-acl squares-db-errorlog tech-squares-officers
on an Athena machine by somebody with "chair" access (which is currently just Alex).
Server
Currently, squaresdb.mit.edu is the same VM as tech-squares-photos.mit.edu
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.
If they should have readonly DB access, you can modify the Ansible script temporarily to create a MySQL user for them, and then run "GRANT 'squaresdb-ro' TO $NEWUSER@localhost; SET DEFAULT ROLE ALL TO $NEWUSER@localhost;" to give them permissions.