On Apr 6, 2011, at 1:34 PM, Bernard Li wrote:

> Hi all:
> 
> On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 11:14 AM, Vladimir Vuksan <vli...@veus.hr> wrote:
> 
>> I spoke to Bernard and we are considering doing a code freeze of the Web
>> 2.0 UI. I'd like to release it by the end of month so that people can start
>> using it.
> 
> Yeah, let's try to get this out soon.
> 
>> From the TODO 
>> https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ganglia/browser/branches/monitor-web-2.0/TODO,
> I'd like to get the following done before the code freeze:
> 
> - Add back the Ganglia logo
> - Provide an easy method for user to add their organization's logo

In my opinion, the new UI features which write to the file system on the web 
server (to save view definitions, etc) should require some kind of 
authentication.  Allowing any random user to change the UI's configuration 
seems like a hole we should fill before releasing.

Does anyone use the 'private clusters' feature which is implemented in 
auth.php?  Seems like we could use this authentication mechanism, though I did 
have a few concerns.
 - The authentication database is a 'private_clusters' text file, stored in the 
same directory as auth.php.  That means I could take a look at 
http://site.com/ganglia/private_clusters via my web browser and download the 
whole list of cluster names & MD5 hashes.
 - I'm not a crypto guy, but I believe the MD5 algorithm is now widely 
considered to be insecure, and not something we should be relying on.  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5#Security

Before release, I suggest we:
 - Move the private_clusters file outside Apache's DocumentRoot.  Maybe 
@sysconfdir@/private_clusters?
 - Update auth.php to use a more secure (but still widely available) hashing 
algorithm.  SHA1 or otherwise?
 - Require authentication for actions which can change UI configuration, like 
creating/altering views, or for any other action which might write user data to 
the web server's filesystem.
 - Support a wildcard cluster name in private_clusters, or a 'root' user, so an 
admin would only need to define 1 password to be able to edit anything in any 
cluster.  Maybe that's what the 'control' context is for?

alex
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