This is a very interesting thread, especially since I am currently wondering how I can do this sort of thing. I want to give a web interface to consultants to view our web site availability. I have created a user and contactgroup which shows only the services I have added the group to. The problem is that even this limited account can switch off checks or notifications and I can't see a way to stop this.

It appears that when this account switches off a notification, this is done on a global basis which is bad. I'm using nagios 1.4.1.

Reading through this thread it appears that the issue is under debate at the moment. Does this mean that what I want, a read only user cannot be done at the moment?

-h

Hari Sekhon


Ton Voon wrote:

On 4 Nov 2006, at 16:43, Alex Burger wrote:

Ton Voon wrote:
Hi Alex,
I think the "read/write" attribute needs to be associated with the contact. So this implementation looks more obvious (to me):
define contact {
name person
contactgroups cg1,cg2,cg3 # means can submit commands
contactgroups_viewonly cg5,cg6
}
This would effectively mean the can_submit_commands attribute is redundant, because you just use contactgroups_viewonly instead of contactgroups.

The more I think about it, the more I think we are looking at this the wrong way.  With file system or application permissions, we would assign a group to a folder/object, and then pick what rights the group would have. Why don't we do the same thing with Nagios?

Leave the groups as they are, but modify the host and service contact_groups command?  For example:

define host{
         host_name               localhost
         contact_groups          netops:rw, helpdesk:r
}

For backwards compatibility, if no permissions are set, the defaults would be rw so the following would be the same:

define host{
         host_name               localhost
         contact_groups          netops, helpdesk:r
}

If a user was in both the netops and helpdesk group, the user should have rw access.

This will take a bit more work to implement, but I think it makes more sense.  What do you think?

Firstly, this is fantastic work, Alex. Nice to see someone run with an idea.

I've been mulling this over the weekend and I think you're right: I was looking at this the wrong way. It was very smart of you to make the analogy with filesystem security and I think you have the right design.

Authorization is about defining a user's permissions on an object (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_control#Authorization). The base objects in Nagios are the host and service object. These objects should then hold information about which users (contacts) are allowed which permission. You've got a good thread on what the permissions should be, so I'll ignore that. But the assigning of permissions at the host/service definition is, I think, the right way to go.

My only request is to add in the ability to check for a single contact too. This will be more important in Nagios 3 as Ethan has said you will be allowed to specify single contacts from a host/service definition, without the need for contactgroups.

When you have your patch applied, I will request removal of the can_submit_commands patch as this is just a fudge from the sophisticated security model you will have added in (my patch is analogous to setting a user to "/bin/false" for their shell, I guess).

Ton

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