Mangling (and Demangling) Users

Overview

All e-mail addresses in a Elite cluster must be unique. This causes problems when we need -- for various reasons -- to have multiple copies of a tenant database with the same users in it.

The solution we came up with is mangling, which involves shoving a GUID in front of the e-mail address to make it completely unique (and unusable). This is also reversible.

All of our Support Tools that involve creating users are designed to ensure that duplicates are not created; they will either refuse to run, or will automatically mangle the email addresses for you.

Use cases

• I am about to do another capsule import and I want to mangle an older tenant beforehand.
• I am about to do a snapshot import (Tenant Copy) and want to mangle an older tenant beforehand.
• I just did a capsule import, and I had an earlier import still active:
  • I want to mangle the older tenant.
  • I want to de-mangle the new tenant.

Pre-requisites

• The account (tenant) must be inactive

This is a destructive action, so we require that the account be inactive in order to perform the operation.

Mangling

In the Support app, click on the Tenant Utilities icon on your inactive account.

In the Tenant Utilities slider, click on the Mangle or Demangle Users icon.

In the User Maintenance slider, select the Mangle email addresses option, then click the Run button.

You may see a spinner for a few moments as it performs the mangle.

When it completes successfully, you should see a green message that indicates how many email addresses were affected by the operation.

Demangling

Essentially, perform the same steps, but choose the Demangle email addresses option. Again, you should see a message indicating how many email addresses were affected.