On Apr 11, 2011, at 9:07 PM, Vladimir Vuksan wrote: > I am not sure what the right approach is. We could provide optional > authentication but this may be better addressed by people implementing access > controls in Apache ie. adding Basic auth to particular URLs. You could > certainly easily "disable" writing by setting proper permissions on conf/ > directory. This may be a non-issue for lots of people who are behind > firewalls and do not want an extra level of authentication. Perhaps we should > just document some of these approaches instead of reinventing the > authentication. > > Thoughts ?
I agree about not wanting to overly complicate things. If we had some is_writable() checks, and didn't display links to actions which required write access (like updating a view) when that access wasn't available, that would probably be enough to implement a basic level of security. It seems a little clunky to have to chmod the filesystem, make some changes, and chmod it back, but it may be good enough for now. If we go that route, I think our Makefile ought to set the conf/ directory as read-only by default. I like the idea of using Apache's authentication mechanisms, but they may not be fine-grained enough in some cases. For example, view.php is used both to display a view and to modify it. How would you make it read-only for some users, but allow admins to edit views? You might be able to use a LocationMatch directive, but that seems likely to become a mess in a hurry. I think it would be pretty straightforward to take the concept already in auth.php, and add a distinction between 'view' (for private clusters) and 'edit' (for actions which change config) permissions. Collecting username & password from the user could still be done via HTTP auth as is already done in auth.php, but you'd need to change the file to distinguish between those who can edit and those who can view. This doesn't feel overly complex to me, but I'm interested in what others have to say. I don't want to hold up a release if I'm the only one who's concerned. Any other opinions out there? alex ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Forrester Wave Report - Recovery time is now measured in hours and minutes not days. Key insights are discussed in the 2010 Forrester Wave Report as part of an in-depth evaluation of disaster recovery service providers. Forrester found the best-in-class provider in terms of services and vision. Read this report now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/ibm-webcastpromo _______________________________________________ Ganglia-developers mailing list Ganglia-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ganglia-developers
