MediaWiki Engineering/Runbook/Reattach a global account

Background

Stewards and all other users with the centralauth-delete permission can delete a global account using the CentralAuth page. That means that the account loses their unified login across all public Wikimedia wikis. With the implementation of the SUL finalisation all accounts are now global by default, and the need to delete global accounts should be rather scarce at this point. Sometimes, however, a global account can be deleted by mistake when stewards intended to globally lock the account instead, and a request to have the account globally reattached could appear.

Steps to reattach a global account

1. Access CentralAuth data for the affected account. You'll see that only local accounts exist and that there's no global account information.
2. On a deployment server :
   1. Migrate the local accounts to SUL account using migrateAccount.php
   2. Attach them using attachAccount.php
3. Log the reattachment on the Production Server Administration Log.

See also

• task T154983
• task T155184 — specially this comment from a sysadmin explaining the process.