User Role Manager

The User Role Manager is an administrative tool for creating user accounts and assigning administrative roles. The intended audience for this article is MIRC system administrators.

The User Role Manager (URM) is a simple page that allows you to create users and roles without having to directly edit the Tomcat/conf/tomcat-users.xml file.

To access the URM, click the User Role Manager button on the admin page of any storage service on the server. All storage services on a server (e.g., a specific Tomcat instance) link to the same URM, and the URM manages all the users on the server. The URM page looks like this:

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• The left column is the username.
• The right column is the user's password. The column is not listed because the page is sent in clear text and there is no sense drawing a hacker's attention. In a future release, the URM can be changed to use SSL.
• The users listed are those that are currently in the tomcat-users.xml file.
• The roles listed are those that are possessed by a current user or ones that appear in the entity definitions in the web.xml files of any of the storage services on the server.

Roles and users are listed in alphabetical order, so when you add one, it won't necessarily appear at the bottom or on the right after you click the Update button.

When the URM receives a post of the form, it updates the tomcat-users.xml file.

• If there is any user with no assigned roles, the user is deleted from the list.
• If there is any role with no assigned users, the role is deleted from the list (unless the role appears in a web.xml file of a storage service).
• If any username is blank, the line in the form is not processed.

You can use the URM to edit the spelling or change the password of any user.

When you create a user, make sure to assign the user at least one role by clicking a checkbox in the row with the user’s name and password, and when you create a role, make sure it is assigned to at least one user; otherwise, when you click Update, the addition will not be processed.

You can add one user and one role per click of the Update button.

In sites running the Smart Memory Realm (all sites after MIRC release T28), the changes become effective within one minute.

Parenthetical note to avoid confusion: When Tomcat is installed, it comes with several users and roles in the tomcat-users.xml file. They are examples to demonstrate the use of the Manager webapp. You can delete them, if you want, using the URM.