[Featureserver] user level cfg?

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 04:33:38PM +0200, Lehtonen, Mika wrote:
> Hi Christopher,
> 
> from my point of view, personating a web application is user related, 
> anyway till some extent, even though any authentication, registration, 
> session management or what so ever would be used. The idea of attaching 
> userid into the request was something that just came up. It doesn't 
> close anything else out. Having a possibility to use your own data in 
> commonly shared webGIS application without any other end-user seeing it, 
> shouldn't be so strange idea. For example, without getting paranoid, you 
> might have something confidential geographic data in your possession, 
> data which your employer don't want you to share. You wouldn't invite 
> every man walking in the street to your home, would you?

Your solution does not help that at all -- security through obscurity
*isn't*. What you're talking about is still allowing anyone off the
street to get the data out -- without authentication/authorization,
nothing is about 'protecting' user data.

Essentially, what you're doing is closing the front door to the house,
while leaving it unlocked. That's fine for some things -- I'd say that's
not an unusual practice -- but if I was living in downtown New York, I
probably wouldn't recommend that practice. The internet is a lot mroe
crowded than downtown new york. :)

Other end users *can* see it. If that's not a problem, that's fine, but
it's not specific to a user.

> BTW, I'm not a novice in Python, I'm all new to it. But I'll see what I 
> can do. Anyway, in order system to be dynamic, you also have to create 
> those files and manage inserting, deleting and updating of the 
> datastores. But I guess I can do all that with the Perl script I already 
> wrote for featureserver.cfg editing.

Note that I wouldn't use featureserver.cfg files for this at all. I
would store the configuration data in a database, and I would create a
Service based on that in Python. The Config file is a convenience -- a
nice convenience, but not the way I would solve your problem.

But I admit that if you're a Python novice, it's handy. My suggestion
would be to become less of a Python novice :)

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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