How to Change Portal permissions for Advanced and Administration pages

Background

GroundWork controls of the content displayed under the Advanced and Administration pages of the JBoss portal. This control is defined in a file called default-object.xml, rather than in the Administration portal. By default the settings in this file take precedence over any database settings, such as role permissions assignments, on a restart of gwservices.

You may want to restrict access to these pages to only specific roles (and not the default ones). That would mean overriding the default settings so that changes in the Administration pages will remain in effect across a restart. This how-to describes the changes to make the database (what you set in the Administration pages) the primary setting.

Note If you do decide to change the default security settings for any Advanced pages (e.g. Nagios) it may not be handled correctly during an upgrade of GroundWork Monitor. In this case you must make note of the change and revert to the default value before an upgrade. As an example of the impact of not following this advice is that in 6.3 they would not see all the new NMS packages!

GroundWork recommends not customizing the portal pages except by adding pages under the Dashboard section. This will avoid this sort of details that you need to keep track of while upgrading.

Instructions

The procedure to change the priority on restart is as follows:

1. Edit /usr/local/groundwork/foundation/container/webapps/jboss/jboss-portal.sar/conf/data/default-object.xml and change <If exists> value from overwrite to keep on line 1211:
   Change:

   <deployment>
           <parent-ref>groundwork-monitor</parent-ref>
           <if-exists>overwrite</if-exists>
           <page>
               <page-name>nagios</page-name>
               <display-name xml:lang="en">Advanced</display-name>
   

   to:

   <deployment>
           <parent-ref>groundwork-monitor</parent-ref>
           <if-exists>keep</if-exists>
           <page>
               <page-name>nagios</page-name>
               <display-name xml:lang="en">Advanced</display-name>
   

2. Restart gwservices:

   /etc/init.d/groundwork restart gwservices