About This System

The AU Lease Notification Center was created as part of the initiative to sign lease via iPad in order to notify administrators when a signed form is uploaded to the server. Full documentation on that system will eventually be available (you will be notified via this site). The Notification Center was born in hopes that all the work done to send notifications about lease forms would be used for other, general purpose AU Lease business.

The system will support any category of post; however, it treats a few categories specially. Any post of category leaseform or install displays an out-of-the-box message saying that a lease form has been signed or a computer has been prepped. Any other type will simply display whatever message the post contains. This means that when you manually create a post, of a custom type, you should type in a full explanation of what the post means.

The built-in types leaseform and install depend on everything going correctly on the database computer in the AU Lease office. The biggest cause of problems is failure to click the "Generate Digital Leaseform" button in the database when new computers are scanned in. If a post of one of these types is missing information like the SR number, contact name, or username, it likely means that the script was never run on the database. It will have to be fixed manually by editing the CSV file. This can be done by using an SFTP client to log into mallard.auburn.edu as aulease. The path to the file is /export/vol2/httpd/htdocs/its/oit/au_lease/notify/resources/notify.csv. You can edit it with Microsoft Excel or any text editor that supports UNIX line endings. That is, not Notepad. The recommended method is to use a Macintosh or Linux computer that is connected to the domain, open the terminal, and run the following commands:

ssh aulease@mallard.auburn.edu
enter password (the cursor will not move) and hit enter
go
pico resources/notify.csv
make the necessary edits (use the keypad to move cursor)
Ctrl + X
Y
Enter
logout

You can receive the notifications posted to this site as an RSS feed. To do this, click the Subscribe button at the top-right of any page. Log in with your Auburn username and the password that has been sent to you. By default you'll receive everything that you don't specifically unsubscribe from. This is explained more on that page. The RSS system may be a little buggy as testing will have to be done on the fly. Make sure to report any errors to Andrew, or list them on this site by creating a post with type rss and checking the "Error" box.