Change Ownership of VOV Projects

It can be necessary or useful to change the owner of a VOV project. For example, a project that was started under an individual's account, but will be shared and should be owned by a role account instead.

VOV records the initial creator of a project as the owner of the project in the project's regentry file. This enables the vovproject list command to show a user the projects that the user has created.

There are several ways change the ownership of a project. Regardless of the method used, it is essential to first stop the project's vovserver before making any changes. The vovserver periodically updates the status of a project and re-writes the regentry file; any changes made while the project is running may be overwritten by the vovserver.

The following are two examples for changing project ownership.

Change Ownership, Method 1

  1. Run vovproject stop, and then run vovproject destroy.
    This will remove the project's .swd and registry entry.
  2. Log in as the desired user.
  3. Recreate the project's .swe and registry entry
    This destroys all record of the existence of the project, including the state of the jobs and files in the project's flow, which may be undesirable.

Change Ownership, Method 2

In this example, you'll stop the project, change the OS ownership of its files, and manually change the project metadata recorded by VOV in the regentry file. Follow the steps to do so:

  1. Locate the project's configuration (.swd) directory with the command vovproject list -all -l.
    The .swd directory is in the directory shown in last column.
  2. Change they ownership using OS commands, such as chown -R on UNIX or Linux.
  3. Edit the security.tcl file in the .swd to add the new owner as admin.
  4. Save the file so that it is owned by the new owner, and is not readable by anyone else.
  5. Locate the regentry file in the registry, being careful to get the one for the right VOV version if you are not in a local directory that is shared among versions.
  6. Open the regentry file and locate the line that looks like: 
    set owner       "previous-owner"
  7. Change the name between the quotes to the desired login account write and quit.
  8. Use vovproject list -all to verify it shows the desired owner for the project.
  9. Get a shell as the desired owner on the project's vovserver host, and start the project using vovproject start project-name
  10. Carefully review the result for messages about ownership.