Re: gnats/445: Problems with access levels

[Yngve Svendsen]

At 11:38 19.12.2002 -0500, franky.backeljauw@ua.ac.be wrote:
> I have several problems with setting up the access levels.  My current 
> settings are "*:listdb:" in gnatsd.host_access and 
> "guest:guest:view:default" in gnatsd.user_access, with both files in 
> etc/gnats.  However, if I do a telnet to gnatsd and execute the command 
> "USER guest guest", it still says that my access level is "listdb".  I 
> have put gnatsd.user_access in the com/gnatsdb/gnats-adm/ directory too, 
> but that does not help either.

In GNATS 4, in order to define a plaintext password "guest", you must 
prefix it with "$0$". Password strings with no prefix are treated as 
standard UNIX encrypted passwords like those in the system passwd file. 
Thus, your entry should look like this:

guest:$0$guest:view:default

> Second, I cannot override the default access level.  I know that setting 
> "*:view:" in gnatsd.host_access sets the default access level to 
> "view".  Now, suppose that in addition I want to give host "myhost" the 
> access level "edit".  It does not help to add "myhost:edit:" to 
> gnatsd.host_access, because it is ignored.  So the only way to give 
> "myhost" the "edit" access level, is to delete the line "*:view:", but 
> then no other host than "myhost" has access to gnats.  Apparently, the 
> "*:view:" line overrides every other line present.  The same goes for 
> lines in the gnats.user_access file.

Remember that entries in these files are read in sequence. When GNATS 
traverses the files, it only looks for the first matching entry, and thus, 
wildcard entries need to appear towards the end of the file. Adding
myhost:edit:
before the "view" entry should do it.

Yngve Svendsen
Gnatsweb maintainer