Admin Tab

Below the Admin tab you have access to the Update server, your personal settings for the look and feel of the administration interface, and the user database for the administration interface, where you set up what users have what administrator rights.

Update

The Update subtab holds the interface for the Update client you may have chosen to activate during the installation phase. This is where you download and install the material that may or may not have been made available to you via the Update server - to date mostly security fixes.

Your Settings

Under this subtab, you may configure the admin interface to your personal preferences. Any and all settings made here affect only the user you are currently logged-in as, "administrator" if you didn't change the name suggested in the installation phase. This list intentionally does not cover all options, but focuses on a selection of the more interesting ones.

Content Boxes

The content boxes let you put various info or news on the start page at the root of the admin interface; alerts of new articles at Roxen Community, info on recently posted tickets to the Roxen Internet Software bugtracking system BugCrunch, server status or other things. Try them out!

Theme

The single most visible configurable option of the admin interface is the theme selection, where you choose whether you want the most recent brand of layout from the Roxen marketing department, the lovely colorful touch of the Power Puff Girls, or something plain different. If you administer several Roxen servers and want to differentiate them from one another, set up your administrator user to different themes for different servers.

With a little tweaking of your own with the colours and other bits and pieces in the shipped themes, you can fairly easily create one of your own. Have a look at the README file in the roxen/server-version/config_interface/themes directory of your installation (where version is the version of your server, e g 2.2.198), copy one of the present theme directories and put it in roxen/local/config_interface/themes/ instead, under a new name, and you're off! Putting it in the local/ hierarchy instead of the server-* tree makes sure your theme is still there when you upgrade to a newer Roxen version. Make sure you change the contents of the name file too to whatever you want to show up in the Theme selector.

Font Sizes

You may freely modify the font sizes used in the docs and for the various form elements of the administration interface with this setting. This setting only affects the contents used in the admin interface sent as text; buttons and other images rendered with Roxen's graphics engine remain their original sizes.

Note!

If you are using an old Netscape browser and consider mostly all fonts to be way too big, it may be an even wiser choice to tell it not to render fonts that big for unicode characters; see Page charset below.

Compact site list

If your server hosts hundreds or perhaps thousands of sites, the overview of all sites below the Sites tab tends to grow into a frightfully long and rather intimidating piece. The compact mode version replaces the site name buttons with a single select box for choosing your site.

Page charset

Being an internationlized product, Roxen supports sending its pages in foreign character encodings of various kinds - for americans or western europeans, ISO-8859-1 may be quite enough all or close to all of the time, but for encoding japanese, chinese, vietnamese or korean characters (to name but some) this is not enough, and thus the administration interface by default sends all its pages encoded in UTF 8, a common Unicode encoding. You may choose to use another encoding that suits you better here, and the characters that can not be expressed within that will be coded as HTML entities instead.

Note!

Some Netscape users may find that all fonts in the administration interface tend to get overly large when the utf-8 setting is used. This is most likely because the font settings under Edit -> Preferences -> Fonts has different settings for different encodings, and the default settings for the encoding Unicode is larger than the rest. Try modifying to your taste, if this is the case.

Interface language

If you would prefer Roxen administration in some other language than American English (or something close to it at least), this is where you can flip the switch to something you prefer over it.

You might notice that many things will still show up in English even after changing languages. If you want to help translating the interface to your language, we will happily receive your contributions and commit your work to future versions of Roxen. See the README file in your roxen/server-version/translations/ directory (where version is the version of your server, e g 2.2.198) for more details.

Font

Changing the administraton interface font will not automatically switch fonts for all text of the admin interface, however all the admin interface's buttons and images rendered using Roxen's graphics support will be.

Note!

If you choose a font that lacks characters that are used by the translation to the interface language of your choosing or that you are using in site names for that matter, you may notice empty buttons and icons popping up all over the place. To fix this, either revert to the "roxen builtin" font, or another Unicode font.

Add/Delete module page type

With this setting, you may change the layout of the dialogue used for adding modules to a site; everything from the normal categorized, two-level folded list with descriptions to a very simplistic view where you can add lots of modules in one go. Try out the different options to find out what you like best.

Users

The final tab contains the accounts for all users who have access to the administration interface, as well as their security clearance - what actions they may and may not perform in the admin interface of your server. Using the first two buttons, you create or delete users (both prompt you for a user name). A new user has no admin rights at all, so you will have to add them to your liking too. After changing the settings below to your liking, be sure to finalize them by clicking a Save button. The data fields for each user (identified by their login name heading) and their purpose:

Real name

The Real name you provide in the first field will be shown at the top right when the user is logged in, and also shows up in the debug log when he or she logs in, for instance "15:39:48 : Buttercup Utonium logged on as buttercup from buttercup.roxen.com (194.52.182.224).".

Password / Again

To change to a new password, write it in these fields. You have to write it twice, to be sure you spell it exactly the way you intended. Case matters. You will be prompted to rewrite the password if the two did not match.

Crypted

If you have a password crypted with the standard unix crypt() method, (for instance as fetched from a non-md5 /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow file) you want to set for the user, paste it in here instead of a plain-text password. This way, you as an administrator need not know what password the user really use - which is a good security practice.

Apart from the text fields, there is also an assortment of buttons. The Save button saves all changes made to the users in the list. Actually, all of the buttons in the matrix to the right are implicit save buttons too, so a change of user rights does not have to be confirmed with another click on Save. The more prominent buttons on the right determine how much fun the user can have, or how much damage she can do, depending on your point of view.

The matrix of administration interface user permissions

All Permissions

Assuming the user is supposed to have all permissions available, use this shorthand instead of manually checking all of the others.

View Settings

To be allowed to access anything at all in the admin interface, apart from user settings, the Home and Docs tabs, a user needs View Settings rights.

Update Client

This flag grants the user rights to use the Update Client.

Site: [your site name here]

If you check one of the Site buttons, the user will have the rights to administer that site's configuration.

Hilfe

Checking Hilfe permissions gives this user the right to login to a hilfe port, thus being able to execute any pike code as the user running roxen via a telnet session. This can be a very handy feature for a developer, and an even greater security hole if used by a malicious user.

Note!

If a Hilfe port is setup not to require authentication at all, the configuration of this flag does not matter - everybody that connect will be allowed to use the hilfe interface.