Users File

To control access, argus wants to know who is permitted to access what. Associated with every valid user is:

username
password
home object (like a unix home directory)
list of access control groups

As distributed, argus gets this data from a text file called users in the data directory.

The code argus uses is designed to be modular and easily replaced with other schemes for authentication. The source tarball comes with a web_auth_prog file as an example of using an external program to do this. The author is also aware of some sites that have written code to query a SQL database.

The format of the users file is:

username  encrypted_password  home_obj  groups...

as an example:

anonymous       any             Top     user
joe		xraO.jc8wztJQ	Top	staff
bobby		UtDsk/kLoJ/HU	Top:Customers:YoYoDyne	yoyo

The password field is encrypted using your systems standard passwd crypt() function. The special value any will permit any password.

The home_object field specifies the name of the object for the user's default page. This is what the user will see when they first log in to argus. It is just like a unix home directory.

Also, just like a unix home directory, the user can do the equivalent of cd .. to visit other pages. To prevent the user from seeing other pages adjust the access control parameters appropriately.

The groups field is a white-space separated list of access control groups. Access control groups are documented further somewhere else.