Web interface usage

This chapter is a general presentation of the Rudder Web Interface. You will find how to authenticate in the application, a description of the design of the screen, and some explanations about usage of common user interface items like the search fields and the reporting screens.

Authentication

When accessing the Rudder web interface for the first time, it will ask you to create an admin account.

You can create and modify user accounts by following the user management procedure.

Presentation of Rudder Web Interface

The web interface is organised according to the concepts described earlier. It is divided in three logical parts: Node Management, Configuration Management and Administration.

Rudder Home

The home page summarizes the content of the other parts and provides quick links for the most common actions.

Figure 1. Rudder Homepage

Node Management

In the Node Management section, you will find the list of all Nodes, the validation tool for new Nodes, a search engine for validated Nodes, and the management tool for groups of Nodes.

Figure 2. List of Nodes

Figure 3. Node compliance

Figure 4. Groups

Configuration Management

In the Configuration Management section, you can select the Techniques, configure the Directives and manage the Rules and check their compliance.

Figure 5. Rules screen

Figure 6. Rule compliance

Figure 7. Directive list

Utilities

This section contains tools useful for your everyday usage of Rudder. This is where you will find the technique editor, the event logs table or the change requests if you have enabled that feature.

Figure 8. Event Logs

Figure 9. Technique Editor

Figure 10. Technique details

Settings

The Settings section provides you a way to modify your Rudder setup: you can setup the available networks for the Policy Server, configure agent run and policy mode, enable web interface options and manage installed plugins.

Figure 11. Settings screen

Figure 12. Changing global agent run

Quick search anything

You might have noticed the small text area at the top of the Rudder interface: it is the Quick Search bar. Its purpose is to enable a user to easily search for Rudder elements (Nodes, Groups, Directives, Parameters, Rules) based on their name, id, description, inventory…

An autocompletion list will appear as soon as Rudder detects an element it can identify, you just have to click on it to be redirected to the element’s configuration page.

More complex search queries can be input using the in: and is: keywords, is targets Rudder objects by type, and in targets elements like name, description…

Those keywords are used to refine a research in case a search query returns too many results.

For example, the naive request for root policy server will likely returns far too many results, because root appears in most node policy server ID field:

Example 1. Example: A lookup for root will return far too many results

root

So you will need to be more precise and stipulate that you only want to search for nodes whose nodeid is root:

Example 2. Example: Only search for the node whose ID is root

root is:node in:id

The available search keywords are:

Table 1. is: keywords
Keyword	Description
node	Nodes
group	Groups
parameter	Parameters
directive	Directives
rule	Rules

Table 2. in: keywords (common)
Keyword	Search for
name	Names
id	IDs
description, long_description	Descriptions
enabled	Enabled elements (true or false)

Table 3. in: keywords (nodes)
Keyword	Search for
hostname	Hostnames
os_type	OS types (windows, linux…)
os_name	OS Names (Windows Server 2012, Debian… )
os_version	OS versions (8, 2008 R2, …)
os	OS Full Names (Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.10 (squeeze)…)
os_kernel_version	OS Kernel versions (3.16, 5.1…)
os_service_pack	OS Service Packs (for Windows and SUSE Linux)
architecture	OS Architectures (amd64, x86_64, i386)
ram	Machine memory
ips	Network IP addresses
policy_server_id	ID of a node’s policy server (root…)
properties	Node properties (arbitrary key=values associated to a node)
rudder_roles	Rudder roles (rudder-reports, rudder-ldap…)

Table 4. in: keywords (groups)
Keyword	Search for
dynamic	Dynamic groups

Table 5. in: keywords (directives)
Keyword	Search for
dir_param_name	Directive parameter names, as in the Techniques metadata.xml ("GENERIC_FILE_CONTENT_PATH"…)
dir_param_value	Directive parameter values
technique_id	Technique IDs
technique_name	Technique names ("Enforce a file content"…)
technique_version	Technique version

Table 6. in: keywords (parameters)
Keyword	Search for
parameter_name	Parameter names
parameter_value	Parameter values

Table 7. in: keywords (rules)
Keyword	Search for
directives	Rules containing those Directive IDs
groups	Rules containing those Group IDs

Example 3. Example: Search for a Node called debian-node

Assuming you have one managed Node called debian-node.example.com, whose ID in Rudder is d06b1c6c-f59b-4e5e-8049-d55f769ac33f.

Type in the Quick Search field the de or d0.
The search result will return this Node: debian-node.example.com — d06b1c6c-f59b-4e5e-8049-d55f769ac33f [d06b1c6c-f59b-4e5e-8049-d55f769ac33f].

Example 4. Example: Search for a directive called Common users

Assuming you have one Directive called Common users, whose ID in Rudder is 6e8ce05b-3f77-4fed-a424-edf0fdaa4231.

Type in the Quick Search field is:directive common.
The search result will return this Directive: Common users — 4a6aaea7-6471-4ca9-8c27-9ee9f44ed882 [6e8ce05b-3f77-4fed-a424-edf0fdaa4231].

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