User authentication alternatives.

[Andrew Cruse]

nagios-users-admin at lists.sourceforge.net wrote:
> On 5/16/06, Tiernan, Michael C. <mtiernan at draper.com> wrote:
>> I'll admit to being a bit green on how to make some of the things
>> happen under Apache so I figured I'd ask this august group for
>> advice. 
>> 
>> I'd like to use the system password file for authenticating users
>> against for nagios and then just use a simple list of the login names
>> for who can be admins. (In short, only one copy of a password but
>> multiple copies of login names.)
>> 
>> Anyone ever done this sort of thing for Nagios?
>> 
>> Thanks for your advice in advance.
> 
> While I'm not aware of a way to do what you seek via
> authentication, there's a plugin for nagios that only allows
> certain people to modify things via the web interface. In
> this way you could seperate users -who could view but not
> change, and admins -who can do whatever they damn well please.
> 
> http://altinity.blogs.com/dotorg/2006/02/index.html
> 
> Might be a different way to accomplish the same task.

I just did this in the .htaccess file for the nagios/share directory:

AuthName "Nagios Access"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /usr/local/nagios/etc/htpasswd.users
AuthGroupFile /usr/local/nagios/etc/htpasswd.groups
require valid-user
<Files cmd.cgi>
require group administrators
</Files>

Just make sure any user you want to be able to effect any changes via
the web interface are in the administrators group.  Users not in the
administrators group will still see links and buttons to make changes,
but won't have permission to do so.

That solves one of your problems.  I suppose for using /etc/passwd for
authentication...you could always write a little wrapper for passwd and
useradd in your system that does the usual stuff but also updates your
htpasswd.users and htpasswd.groups files...

Andrew



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