5.3. Configuring ConsoleUsers Overview¶
There are two modes of configuring ConsoleUser. Each user has its own set of config files that apply only to it and determine its specific characteristics. Often, however, an environment will want many instances of ConsoleUser, each with its own configuration. In addition there are often some global views of configuration that don’t easily emerge from looking at a particular user’s configuration. To help with this we provide a tool to generate many configurations at a time, and if needed, those generated config files can be individually edited.
Each piece of that configuration is discussed in detail elsewhere. See UserDBConfig for the population generation, and Configuration for the specific files to adjust by hand. The rest of this section focuses on the distinction between each piece and where to look to make a particular type of adjustment.
The UserDBConfig tool focuses largely on generating population-wide properties, without offering a lot of individual user configuration options. The population statistics are usually focused on relationships between various entities. These relationships include things like email partners, websites visited, FTP servers used, and so forth.
The UserDBConfig tool largely aims to answer the “what” question during a run. The person designing and running the event controls the “why” and the CyberVAN mappings control the “where”. Individual user configs address the “how”. If any custom triggers or scripts are provided to make sure certain actions happen, those will address the “who”.
Below the different types of configurable parameters are discussed with where they can be changed. Some of the changes would take place after the UserDBConfig tool runs, to make custom changes to ensure certain configurations are in use.
5.3.1. Some Notes About Terminology¶
The word “domain” below is a logical grouping of whatever resource that type of domain represents. A user domain is a list of users, and a web domain is a list of URLs/web servers. These domains may correspond to other elements, like network locations, but they do not have to. These exist solely for the purpose of configuration generation and can be divided in whatever ways make sense regardless of network layout or login domain or anything else.
Also, many of the properties discussed below are expressed as a cumulative distribution function to express the likelihood of any particular element being selected. To see how our files store that information please see CDF Line.
5.3.2. Text Generation Topics¶
The topic of conversation can be specified by instances of ConsoleUser for each activity type (e.g., Email can have one topic while blogging can use a different one). The population-wide stat allows users to specify a list of available topics, and each app will choose one as it needs at random from the list.
To change that for any specific set of configs for any application edit
the app’s config file (e.g., WebBrowser.conf or FTP.conf) and find the
key that ends in topic. Change that to any suitable value.
The list of available topics can be found in the consoleUser install directory in the topics/ directory. Each file that ends in .babble can be used.
5.3.3. Email Relationships¶
The global relationships are governed by the MDIST parameter in the config file. This specifies the proportions of recipients that should, on average, come from each user domain from users in each domain. That is, when the configuration is being generated for a user, the WDIST is consulted to decide what proportion of users are added to its recipients list from each pool of users.
To configure the results for an individual user edit the EmailClient.conf file and change the emailClientRecips line to include the desired recipients with their weights.
5.3.4. Web Browsing Relationships¶
The global relationship for this maps the “favorite” or “bookmarked” sites for users to come from the right proportions of different domains of web servers. These relationships are specified by the WDIST parameter. Users will occasionally return to one of the sites on their list while doing browsing activities.
To configure the bookmark list for a particular user edit the WebBrowser.conf file and change the WebBrowserURIs line to contain the desired content.
One note about this configuration setting. While it tries to encode a global relationship for web traffic, that may not always match the observed traffic. The generated lists will conform to that distribution, but many sites are hyperlinked to sites outside their domain so the traffic generated from following links may diverge from the initial targets. Also, other types of traffic may be carried out over web services, either directly or indirectly (e.g., via a service that uses REST calls). Some of these sites will be expected, like social media sites, but others might not be as clear, like some chat services. All of these factors can contribute to the observed traffic for web not matching the intended ratios.
5.3.6. FTP Sites¶
The population relationships for this are exactly the Web Browsing Relationships values. Each domain will also have a list of FTP sites that are part of it, and the mappings will be made with those to preserve the values.
There is not currently a way to list the files available to download from an FTP site. The UserDBConfig tool uses a default set of files available on the stock Synthetic Internet.
To change either properties for an individual config edit the FTP.onf file and update the ftpDownloads file list of files to get, the ftpFileList for a list of files to upload, and the ftpSites for the list of FTP sites to contact.
5.3.5. Social Sites¶
The general pattern as above repeats for each of the supported social media sites. Above, there was a MDIST or WDIST for Mail and Web relationships. The letter prefix is replaced by the name of the suitable social media site for each of those configurations. For example, Elgg uses the ElggDIST parameter and CopperMine uses CopperMineDist. Other than the specifics of the names like XDIST and XDOMAINS the structure and config approach is the same.
One current limitation of the tool, however, is that it limits ConsoleUser to using a single application “type” to produce any type of activity. Some social sites map to the same archetype of activity, so the end user would end up with only one of those even if the tool generated configs for multiple sites.
To find the config file to use to update specific user instances consult the following mapping:
Social Site
Elgg
Blog.conf
Friendica
Blog.conf
CopperMine
ImageSharing.conf