[Nagios-users] Re: How to Loggout?

[Andreas Ericsson]

Leonardo Henrique Machado wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
>>>I realy think it's a very important feature that nagios lacks. Why cannot 
>>>Nagios handle the autentication by it self? 
>>>
>>
>>Because handling authentication properly is a non-trivial task, which 
>>really isn't nagios's job.
>>Besides, apache is very good at it, and not many users have requested 
>>the feature. If you want to log out, close the browser.
> 
> 
> That's not a good solution. In fact, it's a shame to tell my boss: "Close 
> your browser and open it again to logout as other user..."
> 

Then add the functionality (to the webbrowser or the GUI. The core of 
Nagios really has nothing to do with it), and feel free to contribute it 
back to the community. I'm sure it would be much appreciated as an 
alternative, provided you handle everything properly.

> 
>>If it's really _REALLY_ important that you're logged in as different 
>>users simultaneously (although I cannot for the world of me think of a 
>>reason why you'd want that unless you're already hacking at the cgi's), 
>>you can always hire a consultant to rewrite the GUI for you, or do it 
>>yourself.
> 
> 
> I have 94 distinct labs, allover my state, and I want to log as a
> localadministrator to see the statusmap without showing 94*15 machines
> (which is a messy view). As localadmin I see just the machines that he is
> responsible for. I want to have about 10 Tabs in my browser, each one 
> logged as a different user. I KNOW how to do it, but it would take about 
> 20 lines to explain... Why not just click "logout"?
> 

Because the functionality simply isn't there. And what you describe 
would probably be very difficult to implement, since most browsers share 
cookies between sessions. One way to do it would be to put post-data 
tags in every page you visit, containing password and username, but from 
a security standpoint that's a terrible idea.
But with the resources you should have at hand, considering the apparent 
size of the company, developing your own GUI with all the bells and 
whistles you want shouldn't be too difficult.

> 
>>>We could also have an admin interface to let the contacts change their
>>>passwords.
>>
>>This is trivial to implement with the current authentication system and 
>>some moderately clever PHP/Perl/shell/C/whatever code.
> 
> 
> That's not a nice way to think about this problem. I am able to develop a
> magical script to solve all my problems.

Then by all means... feel free to do so. And by the way; I'm not going 
for nice. I'm aiming at practical and factual.

> Nagios is such a marvelous
> program and everything that could help it become more user frendly,
> should be done. Another magical-script.pl is not a solution... trust me.
> 

I'd rather not. Most useful programs have started out as 
'magical-hack.c' (like BIND, sh, Perl, PHP, wget, RPM, autoconf etc, etc...)

> 
>>>I hope it could be in Nagios 2.0.
>>>
>>
>>It probably will be available when the CGI's have been rewritten in PHP, 
>>which won't happen any time soon, if you are to believe www.nagios.org.
> 
> 
> Better late than never...
> 

Considering the release cycle of Nagios (about one year between 1.1 and 
1.2 and then about 6 months more until 2.0), I wouldn't hold my breath 
if I were you.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson
OP5 AB
+46 (0)733 709032
andreas.ericsson at op5.se


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