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.

Home menu
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.

Nodes
Figure 2. List of Nodes
Node Compliance
Figure 3. Node compliance
Groups
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.

Rules list
Figure 5. Rules screen
Rule compliance
Figure 6. Rule compliance
Directives
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.

Event logs
Figure 8. Event Logs
Technique editor
Figure 9. Technique Editor
Technique details
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.

Settings
Figure 11. Settings screen
Global run settings
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…​

Quicksearch

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, aix…​)

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.

  1. Type in the Quick Search field the de or d0.

  2. 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.

  1. Type in the Quick Search field is:directive common.

  2. The search result will return this Directive: Common users — 4a6aaea7-6471-4ca9-8c27-9ee9f44ed882 [6e8ce05b-3f77-4fed-a424-edf0fdaa4231].


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