About user authentication

Summary of procedure

To set up for user authentication, you perform three steps:

• Step 1 — Enable the feature. You must enable the user authentication feature. You perform this step on the primary Conductor Live node. This step configures enables user authentication at the cluster level. See Step 1: Enable the user authentication feature.

• Step 2 — Apply user authentication on the nodes. You must enable user authentication on every node. You perform this step once for all nodes, on the primary Conductor Live node. This step configures the individual nodes to require that users log in. See Step 2: Apply user authentication on worker nodes.

• Step 3 — Create users. You creates user on the primary Conductor Live. These users now work from the Conductor Live to perform any work on the cluster. These users can't work on the individual worker nodes.

  Typically, you also set up one or two users on the individual worker nodes, but only so that someone can perform troubleshooting tasks on these nodes.

Types of user authentication

There are two ways to implement user authentication. For both types, the first two setup steps are the same. Only the step for adding users is different.

• Local authentication

  With this authentication, you enable authentication on the Conductor Live node.

  You then create users for the entire cluster from the primary Conductor Live node. See Managing users in Conductor Live. Users are assigned a role that controls the user's permissions. These roles are built into Conductor Live. You can't modify the roles or create new roles.

• PAM authentication

  With this authentication, you enable authentication on the Conductor Live node.

  You create user credentials from an LDAP server that is external to the AWS Elemental nodes. The credentials that you assign to the users are stored on the LDAP server.