[Engine-devel] Permissions involved in using REST API

[Jonathan Daugherty]

> >  - Is this expected behavior?  Is there some smaller (less
> >  permissive) change in privileges I can use to bring about the same
> >  behavior?
> > 
> 
> Yes. That's the expected behavior. However, when accessing the API you
> can set the "filter" header parameter to "true", and that will get you
> to the user-level API.  Let me know if you need technical assistance
> with that.

Thanks!  The Filter header works for me.

While it's good to have some means of controlling which users can access
the API, I think that the current means is very misleading and alarming.
It's misleading because it presumes I think admin users are the only
ones who should access the API (I don't) and it is alarming because if I
have to set the admin bit on users to let them do this, I'm not sure
whether I'm inadvertently granting them rights to do other things (I
don't want to).  In any case it certainly isn't how I would imagine some
people think about this sort of use case; for example, if I want my
Jenkins CI system to be able to talk to oVirt via the API, I don't think
of that as administrative access.

I would love to see a new permission checkbox added, e.g., "REST API
access", which I could check or uncheck on a per-user or per-group
basis.  Unfortunately I can't volunteer to do this work myself and even
if I could it isn't yet clear whether such a new feature somehow
conflicts with other design decisions the engine developers have made.

So now my next question is: if I create an admin account without any
privileges as I have described, are there any hidden privileges other
than API access which I need to know that user has?

Thanks!

-- 
  Jonathan Daugherty
  Software Engineer
  Galois, Inc.