#19 User and group authentication and authorization

[Anonymous]

About a year ago, we (Fairfax County Public Schools)
contracted a PERL hacker to modify NMIS 3.3.3 to
include user and group authentication and
authorization. That work was successful, and we have
been using NMIS 3.3.3 with this functionality since
then. We had this code submitted upstream to the NMIS
development team for possible inclusion into the
mainline distribution. We would like to see in the
next version of NMIS the feature set that this
additional code provides, as we of course would like to
be able to leverage any new functionality that comes
from upstream.

In many environments, various departments either would
like or need access to certain information about "the
network". The ability to grant access to certain
information, but not all of it, allows this. Further,
the ability to allow or deny certain functionality in
an application (e. g. adding nodes or deleting them) is
paramount in allowing wider usage of this tool. We,
for example, allow our help desk read-only access to
NMIS. Others can do certain functionality, but not get
full Administrator access to the application. The
user/group authentication and authorization code
mentioned above is what allows us to do this, and our
various departments love it.

We haven't seen any news on the inclusion of our
submitted code into mainline NMIS. If some information
could be provided on this (yes or no), that would be great.

Thank you for producing this tool in the first place.

tprude | at ! fcps ? dot # edu