Changes to the postage stamp server interface and implementation to be made in 2015-April

While the collection of data for the PS1 Science Consortium has ended PS1 continues to take data. This data is only to be available for members of the new PS1 Consortium. (XXX: name?)

Some changes to the operation of the postage stamp system are required to support the new consortium. This page describes the changes. For users who use PSI to submit requests these changes will be mostly transparent. Users who "roll their own" request files will need to insure that they conform to some new requirements.

Some of the details of this may seem somewhat unexpected. When reading this keep in mind that the postage stamp server is implemented in a distributed maner. There is the IPP side and the PSI front end. There are some usage patterns that only use the IPP part. These must continue to be supported. The IPP portion does not have accounts. The PSI side does not manage permissions for users. In the end control of the access to the pixels is through the HTTP server's list of hosts.

Version 1 of the request file is no longer supported. A version 2 file with a valid email address in the request header is required

The email header word was added in version 2. The system needs the value to determine which data the user is allowed access to. The email address is required to be user@domain. Access rights to data is determined primarily from the domain. The system has provision to support different access rights for individual users. That feature is envisioned to be more of an exceptions list and is not encouraged.

At this time no checks are made that an email address supplied through an IPP only request submission actually works. IPP portion of the system does not automatically send any email.

If the email address' domain is unknown to the system. Postage stamp results will be given the default access level (1) unless the specific user has been flagged with greater access level. A user with the default access level may get results from single frame observations made prior to 2015-03-01. Access to stacks is controlled using a new accessLevel column in the ippRelease table in the IPP database.

The postage stamps images and other results may be directed to a different data store location than previously

Currently most postage stamp results are posted to filesets in a single data store product "pstampresults". This product is accessible through HTTP requests from a set list of identified PS1SC institutions. In the new implementation each institution will get it's own data store product. For example requests from ifa.hawaii.edu users will go to an ifa specific data store product. Results for users from Durham will go to a directory specific to that institution. Each product will have it's own list of allowable IP addresses. Certain users (for example MOPS) will have their own data store products.

If the system can't figure out a specific product for the user the results will continue to go to pstampresults.

Other implementation changes

There are also some minor changes to the postage stamp implementation that are being made at this time. These primarily apply to requests submitted outside of PSI.

• Currently if requests do not supply a survey or release the system for look ups by coordinate or skycell fall back to a list of "default data_groups". Over time this list has fallen woefullly out of date. This concept is removed. If no relase information is supplied only data from the 3PI survey is considered.