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Fedora 4 uses servlet container authentication (Realms) to provide minimal protection for your repository, including the set up of "superuser" accounts.  User credentials are configured in your web application container, usually in a properties file or XML file. By configuring superuser accounts you can require authentication for all management (write) operations.  This document describes how to set up Fedora and either Tomcat or Jetty to enable HTTP Basic Authentication, using simple user files.  Consult your web application server documentation for other ways to configure and manage users;  Fedora can handle any user principal passed to it by the servlet container, as provisioned by any of the container's supported authentication mechanisms.

The superuserrole superuser role is fedoraAdmin.  This is comparable to the fedoraAdmin superuser role in Fedora 3, used for Fedora 3 API-M operations.

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• Tomcat

  • Create or edit your $CATALINA_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml file.  It has entries of the form
    

     <user name="principal" password="password" roles="role1, role2, ..." />

    where:

    • name is the user's login id (the principal)
    • password is the user's password
    • roles are the servlet roles they are assigned upon login;  tomcat allows you to specify any number of roles (or no role at all).  Fedora currently supports two roles:  fedoraAdmin, which is the superuser role, and has rights to do everything;  and fedoraUser, which is a user role, and must be granted permissions by the Policy Enforcement Point to perform actions.
      
      

    Sample tomcat-users.xml file that contains three users, two of whom are regular users, and the third of whom (fedoraAdmin) is a Fedora superuser:

    Code Block
    language xml title tomcat-users.xml
    <tomcat-users> <user name="testuser" password="password1" roles="fedoraUser" /> <user name="adminuser" password="password2" roles="fedoraUser" /> <user name="fedoraAdmin" password="secret3" roles="fedoraAdmin" /> </tomcat-users>

  • Configure your Tomcat login realm.
    Modify your file $CATALINA_HOME/conf/server.xml file to configure the login realm with the Fedora 4 webapp context:

    Code Block
    language xml title Tomcat server.xml Realm
    <Context> ... <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm" resourceName="UserDatabase" /> </Context>

    See the Tomcat Realms documentation for more details.

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