Hyrax Admin Interface

This is a place to start discussing peoples desires/needs for a Hyrax Administrators Interface (HAI).

Background

Members of the Hyrax users community are developing robust, highly available data services in operational settings, and have asked for an administrators interface that will allow them to monitor, control, reconfigure, and debug the Hyrax frontend and backend servers from a single console.

Additionally, to support external services integration with the Hyrax data catalog and service, Hyrax needs to provide an administration interface for service configuration and data catalog changes (e.g. adding new data sets to a catalog). Example of an external service integration with Hyrax is an organisation's digital library service for registering and maintaining access to data products. Once the user registers a new data set including data location and data access rights, the user may select an access service and protocol such as Hyrax OPeNDAP or WMS. This external service will connect to a Hyrax service using the Hyrax Administrators Interface to add a new data set to the catalog.

This page is the starting point for organizing the design work for the Hyrax Administrators Interface (HAI).

Definitions

Administrator

The administrator is the human that operates the HAI.

User

The user is a human that uses client software such as Kepler, Matlab OPeNDAP Ocean Toolbox, a web browser, and others to make requests (HTTP, SOAP, etc.) of the Hyrax server.

Operator Console

The 24x7 operator's console to monitor and control the data services as well as the user data requests, and receive service notifications.

Administrator Console

The system administrator's console to monitor, control, reconfigure, and debug the Hyrax frontend and backend servers, and receive service notifications.

Logging and Control

Features

1. Secure log-in for administration - Implementation
2. Control the server (starting, stopping, reconfiguration) - Implementation
3. Access to the running logging information - Implementation
4. Add new datasets to the server - Design & prototype implementation

Use Cases

The Administrator uses the HAI to:

1. Administrator Logs into the Hyrax Admin Interface
2. Control BES connections
   1. Stop and Start a BES
   2. Examine BES processes
   3. Terminate specific BES processes
3. Hyrax OLFS and BES logging service
   1. View OLFS and BES logs
   2. Control OLFS debugging
   3. Control BES debugging
4. Data catalog management
   1. Add a new dataset to the Hyrax catalog

User Management

User management involves two basic activities: Authentication (Ac) and Authorization (Az). Authentication is the process in which the server identifies a particular user. Authorization is the process that determines what a user can do or see on the server.

Features

1. Limit response sizes for non-authenticated users - Implementation
2. Secure user sessions - Design
3. Create administration interface to control users' capabilities - Design

Use Cases

1. User Authentication
   1. User gets an authenticated session.
   2. User gets a secure session.
   3. Authentication mechanism compatibility with OC and Java DAP libraries This is a high priority
2. User Authorization
   1. Manage user access rules.
   2. Limit response sizes.

Features

1. Support for linking the handler with the new API (Adds chunking and compression) - Implementation
2. Support for the new API features that are compatible with DAP2 - Implementation

Period of use

The API features are to be permanent features in the Hyrax data service for use in building administrator and operator console applications to support an operational data service. The operational Hyrax data service is to support various service level access (SLA) requirements and provide timely, reliable data delivery with transaction logging.