[Mapbender-dev] Public access to Mapbender

[Christoph Baudson]

This problem should be solved before Mapbender 2.7 is released. We 
should think about a solution in the next weeks, so we have time to 
implement a solution before the feature freeze.

Fortunately, Armin has added his valuable thoughts on this topic [1]. He 
is the administrator of a large Mapbender installation 
(www.geoportal.rlp.de) and by this has a lot of experience with the 
topic. I urge you to read it and discuss the issues here.

I'll also put it on the agenda of the IRC meeting today.

Thanks

Christoph

[1] http://www.mapbender.org/Public_User


Christoph Baudson schrieb:
> Astrid Emde schrieb:
>> Hello Christoph,
>>
>>
>> Christoph Baudson schrieb:
>>> In the past I have experienced a lot of trouble with demo 
>>> applications that are made public via a user like "demo" and a 
>>> similar password.
>>>
>>> The most annoying problem is, that the account can be disabled by 
>>> trying to log in several times with a wrong password. How about this 
>>> workaround: if the login_count is set to -1 by the owner, the 
>>> login_count would never be incremented in the first place, thus 
>>> never disabling the account. This would be a quick fix.
>>>
>> I favorite this quite easy solution.
>>> A more generic solution could include a new column in mb_user, with 
>>> a "public" flag. If this flag was set, you could log in no matter 
>>> what password you supplied (I think it's counter-intuitive to have a 
>>> password for a public user). Maybe Mapbender should be delivered 
>>> with a default public user, to encourage the usage.
>>>
>>> A less significant problem is, that you do not know if there are any 
>>> "public" users in a Mapbender installation. You always have to try 
>>> "demo", "guest", "gast", "anonymous" etc. if there is no 
>>> documentation. Maybe the Mapbender server should have this as an API 
>>> function, or we could include it in the portal site.
>>>
>>> We should think of a solution, as most installations offer this kind 
>>> of public access.
>> This does not sound as a good solution for me. The administrators of 
>> mapbender should decide by themself whether they want to offer a 
>> public user or not.
>
> This was an additional suggestion. The main idea is to flag "public" 
> users by a column in the mb_user table.
>
> We do not have to include a default public user, although in my 
> opinion this would be more intuitive. The problem would be 
> updates...some installations will already have a user with the name we 
> would come up with ;-)
>
>>>
>>> Christoph
>>>
>> Best regards astrid
>> _______________________________________________
>> Mapbender_dev mailing list
>> Mapbender_dev at lists.osgeo.org
>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapbender_dev
>
>


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