Roles¶

control.access.roles

Roles¶

An administrator has exactly one role, chosen from four:

• superadmin — everything, including this section and replacing the licence document.
• admin — all the everyday work: streams, templates, cluster machines, the archive, playback protection. Exactly two things are closed: the Accounts section and replacing the licence.
• viewer — observation only: the dashboard and the sessions. Configuration is closed entirely, reading included.
• security — supervision: the audit log and its own account. Settings and observed state are closed entirely; the journal, the other way round, opens to neither admin nor viewer.

The viewer deserves a note, because forbidding reads of the configuration looks excessive. It is not: configuration documents carry secrets by construction — passwords for someone else's sources, keys, machine credentials. A document cannot be handed over with its secrets cut out along the way, so it is not handed to a viewer at all.

The role is checked by the server on every request, not only at login.

Adding an administrator¶

The Add account button opens the form:

Enter a temporary password here and pass it to the person however you pass passwords. Tick the Require a password change at first login box: a password you invented on someone else's behalf is known to you as well, which means it has stopped being their secret.

The new account shows up in the list in the Temporary password state:

At their first login the owner of that account lands not in the panel but on the password change form:

Nothing else opens until the password is changed — that is the server refusing, not a window styled to look strict: knowing the addresses does not help you around the form. Once changed, the person is in the panel straight away, with no second login.

Editing, resetting a password and switching access off¶

The Edit button in a row opens everything that can be changed on an existing account:

• Role — a new role takes effect immediately: the account's sessions are dropped, and the person signs in again with the new rights.
• New password — this is how you bring back someone who has forgotten theirs. The panel will show nobody their own password, so a forgotten password is not recovered but replaced. The password issued here is temporary as well: its owner changes it at the next login. An empty field means "leave the password alone".
• Note — what this account is for and whose it is. It earns its keep once there are a dozen of them.
• Disabled — access is closed at once, together with any sessions already open, while the account itself stays.

Switching off is what you reach for most of the time: someone has gone on holiday, changed their job inside the company, lost a laptop. The Delete button erases the account for good; delete when the account was created by mistake.

What a viewer sees¶

Here is the same panel under the viewer role: the menu is down to the dashboard and the sessions, and the configuration sections are not shown.

It is a convenient role for a duty shift, and for anyone who needs to see what is going on without changing anything.