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Chapter 20. Setting user permissions for a Pacemaker cluster

You can grant permission for specific users other than user hacluster to manage a Pacemaker cluster. There are two sets of permissions that you can grant to individual users:

  • Permissions that allow individual users to manage the cluster through the Web UI and to run pcs commands that connect to nodes over a network. Commands that connect to nodes over a network include commands to set up a cluster, or to add or remove nodes from a cluster.
  • Permissions for local users to allow read-only or read-write access to the cluster configuration. Commands that do not require connecting over a network include commands that edit the cluster configuration, such as those that create resources and configure constraints.

In situations where both sets of permissions have been assigned, the permissions for commands that connect over a network are applied first, and then permissions for editing the cluster configuration on the local node are applied. Most pcs commands do not require network access and in those cases the network permissions will not apply.

20.1. Setting permissions for node access over a network

To grant permission for specific users to manage the cluster through the Web UI and to run pcs commands that connect to nodes over a network, add those users to the group haclient. This must be done on every node in the cluster.

20.2. Setting local permissions using ACLs

You can use the pcs acl command to set permissions for local users to allow read-only or read-write access to the cluster configuration by using access control lists (ACLs).

By default, ACLS are not enabled. When ACLS are not enabled, any user who is a member of the group haclient on all nodes has full local read/write access to the cluster configuration while users who are not members of haclient have no access. When ACLs are enabled, however, even users who are members of the haclient group have access only to what has been granted to that user by the ACLs. The root and hacluster user accounts always have full access to the cluster configuration, even when ACLs are enabled.

Setting permissions for local users is a two step process:

  1. Execute the pcs acl role create…​ command to create a role which defines the permissions for that role.
  2. Assign the role you created to a user with the pcs acl user create command. If you assign multiple roles to the same user, any deny permission takes precedence, then write, then read.

Procedure

The following example procedure provides read-only access for a cluster configuration to a local user named rouser. Note that it is also possible to restrict access to certain portions of the configuration only.

Warning

It is important to perform this procedure as root or to save all of the configuration updates to a working file which you can then push to the active CIB when you are finished. Otherwise, you can lock yourself out of making any further changes. For information on saving configuration updates to a working file, see Saving a configuration change to a working file.

  1. This procedure requires that the user rouser exists on the local system and that the user rouser is a member of the group haclient.

    # adduser rouser
    # usermod -a -G haclient rouser
  2. Enable Pacemaker ACLs with the pcs acl enable command.

    # pcs acl enable
  3. Create a role named read-only with read-only permissions for the cib.

    # pcs acl role create read-only description="Read access to cluster" read xpath /cib
  4. Create the user rouser in the pcs ACL system and assign that user the read-only role.

    # pcs acl user create rouser read-only
  5. View the current ACLs.

    # pcs acl
    User: rouser
      Roles: read-only
    Role: read-only
      Description: Read access to cluster
      Permission: read xpath /cib (read-only-read)
  6. On each node where rouser will run pcs commands, log in as rouser and authenticate to the local pcsd service. This is required in order to run certain pcs commands, such as pcs status, as the ACL user.

    [rouser ~]$ pcs client local-auth