Adding administrator accounts

Accessing the Appliance Manager

The Appliance Manager is a browser-based administration tool that enables you to customize and maintain your configuration. To launch the Appliance Manager, open a Web browser and point it to

http://hostname:port

where hostname is the name of the appliance, and port is the Admin Port setting. The default Admin Port setting is 3132.

For example:

http://cache1:3132/

Default administrative user name and password

When you select an option from the Appliance Manager, you are prompted for a user name and password. By default, the user name is admin, and the default password is NetCache.

Administering access

User names, passwords, and group memberships are assigned using the authentication user and group options in the Appliance Manager. Use these options to do the following:

Add users individually
Authenticated users who are not members of any groups are assigned default access permissions. There is only one set of default access permissions. Permissions cannot be modified on a per-user basis.
Manage groups of users
Create groups, specify group memberships for users, set access permissions for the group, and edit user and group information for the local user database.

Note
A user can be a member of one group or multiple groups. Group access permissions can be set and modified on a per-group basis.

About authentication

Authentication is the process of determining a user's identity so that the user becomes known to the system. In addition to verifying a user's identity, authentication can be used in conjunction with access controls to enforce local security, allocate resources, and keep records of traffic.

The appliance authenticates a user for the first time when ACLs specifying authentication are applied, forcing authentication.

System administrators cannot access the Appliance Manager unless the user database contains at least one user name and password. The appliance provides a default administrator account and a default group called NetCache. The account user name is admin and the password is NetCache. All permissions assigned to the NetCache group apply to the default administrator account.

The default admin user account is configured with permissions to use all protocol services, as well as permissions to access the Appliance Manager and change the appliance configuration.

Note
The administrator user account user name and password are case-sensitive.

Using the Admin ACL option, you can create profiles with different levels of access for administrators. For example, you can apply different ACLs to different administrator accounts and allow some administrators to monitor the status of the appliance, but prevent them from making configuration changes.

When does the appliance authenticate a user?

The appliance authenticates a user for the first time when ACLs specifying authentication are applied. A user is authenticated against the local database. When authentication succeeds (that is, a match is found), any groups that a user belongs to are determined.

About the local user database

The user database contains administrator user account information that provides instructions for handling requests. Because it can contain group information, it can be used to assign access permissions based on group membership.

Groups

Grouping administrators is common practice and makes administering access less complicated than administering access by individual user. For example, the appliance can be configured to authorize access to administrative features for users in a senior administrative group, while prohibiting access to a junior group of administrators.

Where authentication server information is logged

The appliance logs general information pertaining to authentication in the Messages log file. For example, if repeated authentication failures occur, the appliance logs a simple, explicit message noting that there were many authentication failures. You can use information such as this to assess if there might be a communication problem between the appliance and the authentication server rather than a true failed attempt to authenticate the user. The appliance logs this event as a connectivity error. Notification of this event in the log may indicate that a link is down between the appliance and the server.