Defining Usage
Defining account "usage" in a Domain of One's Own environment might look a bit differently at each institution, given there are so many ways someone might work with cPanel. For instance: installing applications, working with SFTP, setting up custom DNS records, building static HTML sites, etc.
You'll also want to consider some of the following questions: Will course work or student projects be kept as an archive after the student as graduated? Will accounts be removed automatically when students lose access to their email address? Should accounts be suspended when a user hasn't logged in after X months?
These questions can only be answered by you, which means that Reclaim Hosting will never set these boundaries on your behalf. That said, we can certainly help provide the data needed to diagnose accounts. For more information, please read more about how the account cleanup process works.
Evaluating Usage
When evaluating the usage of your system there are key elements that may help you determine whether an account is “active” or not. This can be particularly important when setting up de-provisioning policies.
For some, simply generating a list of graduate email addresses and requesting Reclaim Hosting process terminations on those is enough. For others, more investigative work might be useful to first understand how accounts are being used.
Does the user log into applications directly, therefore bypassing SSO/cPanel logins? Do users reference static HTML sites regularly without logging in regularly to maintain them? Are users taking advantage of Domain/DNS functions in cPanel without hosting projects?
Gathering Data
As a starting point for determining usage and reaching out to users with potentially unused accounts, Reclaim Hosting has generated a Python script that runs nightly on all servers and gathers the following data points from a variety of locations on the server:
- Date of last cPanel login
- cPanel Username
- Domain Name
- Email Address
- Disk Usage for Account
- Date of Signup
The script generates a CSV file on the server located in the /root/ folder with the naming convention serverhostname_last_logins.csv.
To retrieve this file, you have a couple of options:
- If your user account has
sudoaccess to your server, you can copy this file somewhere easily accessible to you on the server and then download it using either sftp or the file manager. - Reach out to us at Reclaim Hosting via a support ticket and we can provide it to you.