Role based access control

Solaris and Illumos provide sophisticated role-based access control for delegating authorizations within the system. Using RBAC, users can be given permissions to manage and update services without sudo.

This cookbook provides chef with LWRPs to manage RBAC and grant permissions.

At this time this cookbook ONLY manages SMF-related permissions (ie, ability of non-priviliged users to start/stop SMF services), but in the future it may be enhanced to support arbitrary Solaris permissions.

Installation

In order to add the RBAC LWRPs to a chef run, add the following recipe to the run_list:

rbac::default

This will do no work, but will load the providers.

LWRPs

rbac

Defines a set of authorizations that can be applied to SMF services and authorized to users, without actually applying them to users.

Actions:

• create (default)

Attributes:

• name

Example:

rbac "nginx" do
  action :create
end

This will update the authorizations file at /etc/security/auth_attr with the following lines:

solaris.smf.manage.nginx:::Manage nginx Service States::
solaris.smf.value.nginx:::Change value of nginx Service::

Users who are given these authorizations can change properties of the service as well as change its state (i.e. svcadm disable|enable|restart|clear service

rbac_auth

Adds the rbac definition created by auth to the user name.

Actions:

• add (default)

Attributes:

• name - for descriptive purposes and to ensure that each LWRP call is uniquely identified in the chef run
• user
• auth

Example:

rbac_auth "add nginx management permissions to my_user" do
  user "my_user"
  auth "nginx"
end

This adds both manage and value auths to user my_user.

TODO

• separate manage auth from value auth
• ability to delete all rbac attributes