First Chicago's Vote-By-Net and Consent Gathering Systems

A Handoff Guide -- Kirk Israel [kisrael@alienbill.com]

History/Overview

FCTC's "Vote By Net" is a system that allows shareholders for various companies to vote their shares via proxy over the web. It was the first site to offer this service, although systems that permitted proxy voting over the phone set the precedent for it. The site also has a suite of web-based tools that allow non-technical users to customize proxy cards, including the company's issues, the look-and-feel, the logos, and the dates the proxy is available for voting. The project was started in late 1996 and opened for business in early 1997.

Later, a similar subsystem was added to Vote-By-Net that allowed shareholders to give their consent to being sent electronic (rather than printed) copies of the company's annual report. The Consent Gathering System contained much of the same functionality, and features were added to the original system that allowed endusers to easily go to the consent gathering portion after they had voted their shares. It was developed during late 1997.

Basics

Site:

The site's URL is http://www.vote-by-net.com/ It is a solaris server (aka web34a.bbnplanet.com) hosted by BBN-Planet. Their e-mail is ops@bbnplanet.com - currently I receive mail from them every so often on minor site issues, so we need to change the contact person from IDD's standpoint.

Logging in:

You need 3 bits of information and one piece of hardware to log in to the site. (Note that only certain IP addresses are allowed to connect via telnet, so you need to go through "proxy.iddis.com" to connect and not from some outside source.) To log into www.vote-by-net.com, use username "vbnadmin", password "tough100". You will then be asked for a passcode. To generate this, you need the SecurID that's been provided by BBN. Enter the number "781898" and press the diamond key (if you make a mistake, press the diamond key and start type it over.) It will then use its internal clock to generate the passcode. Enter this passcode at the prompt.

The vbnadmin account has some useful aliases defined upon login in the .alias file (sourced in the .cshrc) These aliases are:

homejump to /home/207.121.184.68 where a lot of data files are kept, as well as being the parent directory for both the secure and normal web servers (more on that later)
atdjump to insecure htdocs root, /home/207.121.184.68/http_80/htdocs
atsdjump to secure htdocs root, /home/207.121.184.68/https_443/htdocs
atbjump to insecure cgi-bin root for the admin section, /home/207.121.184.68/http_80/cgi-bin/admin
atsbjump to the secure cgi-bin root, /home/207.121.184.68/https_443/cgi-bin
credit the crontab file
vlview last entries of log for normal web server /bbn/logs/hterror_207.121.184.68_http_80
vslview last entries of log for secure web server /bbn/logs/hterror_207.121.184.68_https_443
Anything file under /home/207.121.184.68/http_80/htdocs is accessed from the URL http://www.vote-by-net.com , anything under /home/207.121.184.68/https_443/htdocs is accessed via https://www.vote-by-net.com -- something similar applies to cgi-bin.

Admin Pages:

The main admin page is at http://www.vote-by-net.com/cgi-bin/admin/admin.pl Currently it's user: admin password: !firebrand

It has links for the following:

Likely Tasks

Other Documents