[Engine-devel] Permissions involved in using REST API

[Itamar Heim]

On 11/07/2013 07:20 PM, Jonathan Daugherty wrote:
>>>   - 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?

the main difference between an 'admin' and a 'user' is that admin has 
read-only permission to see all objects in the system, and a user can 
only see objects they have permissions on.
the 'right' way should have been that the default access would be for 
user mode, and an admin would have to set 'admin:true' rather than user 
set 'filter:true'. but admin api pre-dates user mode, and we didn't want 
to break backward compatibility.
michael/juan - thoughts on how to make this more, well, sensible?