Authentication / Authorisation

# Old Style Authentication

In the versions prior to 1.5 NagVis didn't care much about the authentication and authorisation. In most environments NagVis used the basic authentication provided by Nagios. This was a side effect of that NagVis was placed in the `nagios/share` directory.

In NagVis 1.5 the default installation directory has been moved to an own base directory. With this step a new Authentication and Authorisation mechanism has been created. The main focus of this concept is to be modular and flexible.

If you really like to use the basic authentication provided by Nagios you may use the LogonMixed (default) or LogonEnv module to set up a trusted authentication. The only difference is that the LogonMixed falls back to the HTML form LogonDialog when no user is given by the webserver while LogonEnv simply shows an access denied message.

To enable this simply set the following options in the `[global]` section of the NagVis main configuration file:

    logonmodule="LogonEnv"
    logonenvvar="REMOTE_USER"
    logonenvcreateuser="1"

These lines advise NagVis to use the LogonEnv module which reads the authenticated user from an environment variable. The second parameter tells the LogonEnv module which variable to use for reading the users name. The third option tells the LogonEnv module to create unknown users in the NagVis AA database.