Knowledge Base

Read only access to web interface

Question

I love the web interface, but I'd love to give access to it without the ability to add/delete targets or change settings. Is it possible?

Solution

It is! In PingPlotter version 5.17.0 and above, you can set user permissions that restrict edit access to specific elements of the web interface. Refer to this entry in the PingPlotter manual to learn how to enable user permissions.

In addition, PingPlotter's web UI has a feature called Live Share, which lets you generate a link to a specific, read-only trace or summary page.

Yes!

This is an advanced topic and should be done only by experienced users.

There is a setting in the "Default.asp" file that will switch the user interface to read-only. The fastest / easiest way to turn the web interface to read-only is to use your favorite text editor and edit the file (Program Files)/PingPlotter Pro/www/Default.asp/www/Default.asp. Near the beginning of this file is a constant called "EDITING_ALLOWED" - change that to False.

On some operating systems, you may need to change the permissions on this file/folder to allow editing before you edit it.

Once you do this, all access to the web interface will be read-only.

Updating to the latest version of PingPlotter or reinstalling will overwrite this change, so you'll need to re-do it if you upgrade.

Even more advanced...

The read-only method doesn't give you access read/write, which you might want. You can set up an alternate page to do read-only.

Make a copy of the default.asp script in the PingPlotter Pro www directory and use that for your editable interface. For this example, we'll call it "default_admin.asp" Now, edit your default.asp file to set it to read-only view (you'll see a constant near the beginning for "EDITING_ALLOWED" - set that to false).

Now, your standard view people will get read-only views. We still need to add your read-write page / view, though. The web interface in PingPlotter Pro must have all its pages explicitly defined, so let's go add that.

• Go to Edit->Options, Web Server
• In the "Served File List", hit "Add".
• For HTTP name, enter "/default_admin.asp" (no quotes, but the slash is required).
• For local file, enter "default_admin.asp+" (no quotes, the + is required to tell PingPlotter Pro to parse this script).

OK, so now if you access http://(your web server:port)/default_admin.asp, you'll get a read-write web interface.

For more security (or obscurity, as the case may be), you can change "HTTP name" to be more obscure. If you change the "HTTP name" to "admin_editable_tri34a23", then you'll be able to access this page with the URL: http://(your web server:port)/admin_editable_tri34a23 - you can change it occasionally if you think someone's doing something they shouldn't. Note that it doesn't need to have an .asp extension - you can use anything you like.

For Version 5:

When we went from version 4 to version 5, we overhauled the entire program, including a rewrite of the whole code base. This increased performance and stability, and opened up a lot of new doors for features to move forward with in the new version.

For this reason, some features didn't make it into version 5, and that would include the solution found above. The solution above is, in fact, intended as a workaround. While we keep building the next generation of PingPlotter, version 5, we're making sure that we put our best foot forward - and sometimes that means that we need to take the time to fully pull together a better solution where we previously pointed our customers toward a workaround.

When we do get the better solution for a read-only web interface going, this page will be updated with relevant information. Check back again in a while!