Chapter 04: Installing an Authentication Plugin

Overview

ICAT relies on plugins to handle different methods of authenticating users to the system. There are 4 plugins available: an anonymous plugin allowing anonymous users; a simple plugin allowing a list of usernames and passwords to be defined at install time; an LDAP plugin to connect to an LDAP server and a database plugin which re-uses the relational database to store the usernames and passwords. In this tutorial, we will use the simple authentication plugin. However, it is worth noting that most facilities who use the ICAT software write their own plugin.

Download and unzip

wget http://www.icatproject.org/mvn/repo/org/icatproject/authn.simple/1.1.0/authn.simple-1.1.0-distro.zip
unzip authn.simple-1.1.0-distro.zip

Configure the authentication plugin

Change directory to authn_simple and use your favourite editor to configure the authn_simple-setup.properties file. Since this is just a test system, we do not need to configure secure access so set secure to false. The container in this tutorial is Glassfish (note the case) and the home points to the location of the GlassFish installation, in this tutorial it is /home/glassfish/glassfish4. Finally we set the port for communication with the GlassFish server.

#Glassfish
secure = false
container = Glassfish
home = /home/glassfish/glassfish4
port = 4848

In the same directory, you will need to configure the list of usernames and passwords in the authn_simple.properties file. For this tutorial, we will define 3 users: root, ingest and stuart. The mechanism option is used to label this authentication mechanism and is useful when there is more than one authentication plugin installed. For example, if there was a user called stuart in the simple authenticator and the db authenticator, then we would refer to the user in the simple authenticator as simple/stuart and the user in the db authenticator as db/stuart. In this way we can be clear which user we mean. In some ICAT documentation, the mechanism is referred to as mnemonic. The two terms can be used interchangably.

#User list
user.list = root ingest stuart

user.root.password = pw
user.ingest.password = ingest
user.stuart.password = stuart

mechanism = simple

Install the authentication plugin

Installing most ICAT components consists running ./setup install. We use the -vv flag here to turn on extra verbosity so that we can see what the setup script is doing.

./setup -vv install