Elevated Privileges

What are elevated privileges?¶

Elevated privilege enable course staff to troubleshoot students notebook interface in the hub. If you have such privileges, you can:

1. Start and stop students’ servers
2. Access students’ servers to debug issues

bCourses¶

This feature is facilitated by users’ bcourses affiliations. It makes it easy for us to ensure that the right stakeholders have the elevated privileges for a particular course. If you do not have a bCourses site for your course, or it is unpublished, you will need to publish it. If you would not otherwise create a bCourses site and feel that using one would be confusing for your students, create a banner in your bCourses site highlighing that you are not using bcourses for your course work. If you need more input, please contact the support team.

Obtaining Elevated Privileges¶

Only course staff should have elevated privileges. If you need such access, you can create a github issue. By default, those who are assigned the teacher or ta role in bCourses will be given privileges.

To assign elevated privileges to a set of people other than all course staff, (for example a subset of them) please do the following:

1. In order to assign people to a group, they must have the role of “student”. By default, course staff are either “teacher” or “ta”, but they can be assigned more than one role. Visit the People section and click + People. Specify the users’ email addresses and make sure the Role is set to Student.
2. Create a bcourses group. The first step will be to create a groupset and then create a group inside it. For example, you can title the groupset “Staff Groups” and the group “Hub Admins”.
3. Add people to the created group.
4. Share the bcourses ID in the Github template. The admins will make changes to the DataHub configuration to enable this feature. If you are assigning privileges to a group of people other than course staff, specify this in the Github issue.
5. Once elevated privileges are assigned to jupyterhub groups based on the DataHub documentation, the people being granted those privileges will need to logout of the hub and then log in again for the config changes to persist. This is not the same thing as stopping and starting the server -- users need to click “Logout”.
6. You will be able to access the admin interface in the UI by navigating to “/hub/admin” and check for the admin status of varied users. You will also be able to use the “Manage groups” option in the admin interface to check the bcourses id of courses with admin privileges.
7. Sometimes, users in your course might not be listed as part of the admin interface. During those circumstances, it is recommended that those users log out of the hub and then log back in. It might take sometime for those users to be listed as part of your admin view.

Admin Dashboard¶

To access the admin dashboard, login to your hub and click the admin option from the top bar. If you have been recently granted elevated privileges, you will need to first log out and then back in.

User Servers¶

1. Click on the control panel.

   

2. Click admin.

   

3. Search for the user.

   

4. Click Start Server if it is not running. Click Access Server or Stop Server if it is running.

RStudio¶

RStudio does not have buttons or links to JupyterHub features like the admin dashboard. To access them when using RStudio, replace /user/your-calnet-id/rstudio in the URL with /hub/admin to access the admin interface.