Working with External Collaborators

Collaborator Account Introduction

UMIACS provides collaborator accounts to facilitate collaboration with non-UMIACS Faculty, Staff and Employees. These accounts can access resources such as GitLab, UMobjstore, Wikis, and other web-based applications. These accounts do not have storage and access to UMIACS workstations however. Full accounts are needed to access resources collaborator accounts do not have access to.

How do I create a Collaborator Account?

A UMIACS Account holder has to sponsor the Collaborator Account. This is done in our UMIACS Requests Application. This will send an email to the Collaborator to set their details (including a username and password). Once the Collaborator has created their account, an email will be sent to both the account sponsor and the Collaborator that the account is ready to use.

GitLab

GitLab is a source code collaboration software based on Git source control management. It allows users to create their own repositories and share them with other users/groups or publicly. It supports built-in project wikis, code review, and issue tracking for each project. A full list of features can be found on the GitLab website.

All code is hosted on-site on UMIACS servers and is backed up nightly. We give all UMIACS users 5 projects with a soft limit of 400Mb per project. Projects that you create inside of a group namespace still count towards your project limit. UMIACS Staff can help create Lab groups (called namespaces) and delegate authority to manage the group to one or more faculty members. Permissions are assigned within GitLab. The UMIACS AR system is not used with GitLab.

To get started, navigate to the following URL in your browser and enter your UMIACS credentials in the "UMIACS Onsite/LDAP" tab:

 https://gitlab.umiacs.umd.edu

 Note: There might be issues connecting to GitLab if you are using an older git client. Therefore, please make sure you update your git client. 
 If you use TortoiseGit, please make sure it is updated to versions above TortoiseGit 2.1.x.x.

GitLab Collaborators

Any UMIACS user can now create an unlimited number of offsite collaborator accounts for our Security Groups, GitLab and Object Store. These accounts can not create repositories or groups, but may be given access to your repositories or groups. You can find this utility in our Requests application under UMIACS Collaborators.

Security Groups

SecGroup are authentication groups that give pis the ability to manage which users should have access to different applications that they manage. They provide fine-grained access control to wikis, source code repositories, and certain web applications. SecGroups are the replacement for ARs

Viewing Security Groups

You can view which SecGroups you are in through the directory app SecGroups

Obj

UMobjstore is the Django web application component complementing UMobj, the command-line utility. UMobjstore gives users a convenient interface to our Ceph Object Stores which are distributed across different machines, so that machines can fail and the cluster keep functioning

When to use UMobj

Use umobj if:

• you have a large number of files to upload (hundreds or thousands of files)
• you are uploading large files (files greater than 4GB in size)

Supported object storage clusters

• https://obj.umiacs.umd.edu/obj

Wikis

Wikis are great for providing documentation through static websites. In order to access a particular wiki a user will first have to be added to the respective SecGroup.