Backtalk Administration Guide:

Changing Fairwitnesses

Version 1.0.9

© 1996-1999 Jan Wolter, Steve Weiss

Fairwitnesses are the hosts of conferences, how have special powers enabling them to administrate particular conferences. You can changing the fairwitnesses of an existing conference either from Backtalk's web interface or from Unix.

Changing Fair-Witnesses From Backtalk:

To change the fairwitnesses of a Backtalk conference, follow the following steps. (The checkboxes below perform no function - they are just for your convenience.)

  1. Log into the administration account

    Point your browser to the Backtalk adminstration page, which has a URL something like:

       http://your.host.name/cgi-bin/adm/bt/admin/begin
    
    You should be asked to login when you try to access this page. You should login to the Backtalk adminstrative account, usually called ``cfadm''. You should bookmark this page so you can find it easily whenever you have adminstrative tasks to do.

    The URL above runs the copy of Backtalk in the "adm" subdirectory instead of the usual "pw" subdirectory. This copy of Backtalk isn't really any different, but the two programs are set up to authenticate separately, so that you can simultaneously be logged in to the "pw" version with your regular user account and to the "adm" version with the conference adminstration account. This can be a little confusing, but otherwise you would have to exit and restart your browser to change between two identities like that.


  2. Goto the conference edit page.

    There is a link on the administration page labelled "Edit a Conference". Click on this.


  3. Specify the conference to be edited.

    You will be shown a form one box. Enter the name of the conference that you want to edit here and kill the button labeled "Edit It".


  4. Specify the new fairwitnesses.

    The form that comes up next will include a textbox containing the current list of fairwitnesses. Edit this. You can list more than one fairwitness, so long as the names are separated by commas (but not spaces).

    When you are done, click on the "Change Settings" button.


    Changing Fair-Witnesses From Unix:

    The procedure used to change fair-witnesses from Unix is identical to that used for Picospan or Yapp 2.3 conferences.

    To change the fairwitnesses of a Backtalk conference, follow the following steps. (The checkboxes below perform no function - they are just for your convenience.)


    1. Log onto the Unix conference administration account.

      This is the account that owns all the conference files and the backtalk program itself.


    2. change directory to conference directory

      Each conference has a directory where all its files are kept. There is a pointer to this directory in the conflist file. The location of the conflist file depends on how your system is configured.


    3. Edit the conference config file

      Inside the conference directory, you will find (among other things) a file named config. This is the file we need to edit to change the conference fairwitnesses. A typical config file looks like this:

          !<pc02>
          .martian1.cf
          0
          marvin,carter
      
      (There may be some additional lines at the end.) The fourth line of this tells us the names of the current fairwitnesses of the conference. All we need to do to change the fairwitnesses is edit this line. It should just be a list of the Backtalk login names of the users who are to be fairwitnesses. If there is more than one, their names should be separated by commas (but no spaces). There should always be at least one fairwitness.