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navhome

The Home page components

The main view

The home page of NAV consists of the following elements;

  1. A welcome message to anonymous and logged in NAV users.
    Edit the files webfront/welcome-anonymous.txt and webfront/welcome-registered.txt.
  2. A display of operational messages, if any.
    You add or modifiy messages using the messages tool.
  3. An overview of boxes that are down, if any.
    A link to the Status tool is provided for further details.
  4. A NAV link box.
    Edit the file webfront/nav-links.conf. If the config file is empty or missing the box will not show up.
  5. An external link box.
    Edit the file webfront/external-links.txt. If the config file is empty or missing the box will not show up.
  6. Contact information.
    Edit the file webfront/contact-information.txt. Relevant information is typically email and phone number to network and/or system operations.

The NAV bar

The NAV bar is always available, not only on the home page, as a navigating bar on the top. It provides buttons for login / logout, link to the toolbox, user-defined quicklinks, userinfo, and preferences.

Login / logout

Login to get access to more NAV tools. The NAV administrator must first add you as a user using the user administration panel. Each user has a certain set of privileges that controls which tools he or she may access.

The user will be automatically logged out from NAV after a configurable time of inactivity. Adjust this parameter by altering the timeout value in webfront/webfront.conf. The default value is 1 hour (3600 seconds).

Use LDAP authentication

If you will have many NAV users and your organization's user database is available through LDAP, you should consider enabling LDAP authentication for the NAV web interface. LDAP configuration and usage is documented here

The tool box

The toolbox lists all the NAV tools with a brief explanation and lets you navigate to your tool of interest.
The buildup of the tool box is based upon *.tool-files in the /usr/share/nav/tools directory. Each tool file points to an icon, has a name, url, textual description and priority. The priority is basis for the order the various tools are presented in the toolbox.

Userinfo

Userinfo displays information about you: your username, name, organization and group memberships. Userinfo also lets you change your password. For “normal” users this is the place to change password, as they do not have access to the user admin panel.

Preferences

Preferences contains two subtools; navigational preferences and status page preferences. In both cases we are talking about your personal preferences - a means of altering the look and feel of your NAV user account.

Choose which tools you would like to include as quicklinks, easily reached from the NAV main page. You may add any url, NAV local or external.
Two examples using this “Add personal link” option:

  • You want a link to the Report tool from Quicklink #1: Simply add Name=Report, URL=/report and choose use in quicklink #1.
  • You want a link to www.cisco.com from Quicklink #2: Add Name=Cisco, URL=http://www.cisco.com and choose use in quickink #2.

(Note: The admin user (must be username admin) has special privileges when using 'Add personel link'. Changes he make takes effect for new and anonymous users. Existing users quicklinks will not be changed.)

Status page preferences

Use this tool to alter the view of the status page. You may include more monitoring status on the status page (add new section). You may also adopt filters to suppress certain alarms and thus only displays those of your interest.

If you have activated quicklink #1 and/or quicklink #2 using navigational preferences they will be visible from the NAV bar.

Configuration files

/etc/nav/webfront is the directory for configuring the NAV home page. Add your welcome message to users in the the various welcome-files, edit your contact information and more.

If you would like to use LDAP or adjust the user inactivity timer, make changes in webfront.conf.

Log files

NAV's web interface logs to the file webfront.log. This file doesn't exist by default. It must be created in NAV's log directory and the user that the Apache server is running as must have write privileges to this file. NAV uses the Python logging framework when logging to this file. You can create the config file logging.conf to define which log levels should be used for individual loggers. If you wish to se debug messages for all parts of NAV from the web interface, create a logging.conf file containing the following:

[levels]
root = DEBUG

If you only wish to se debug message for specifically web related modules, use this:

[levels]
nav.web = DEBUG
navhome.txt · Last modified: 2008/06/02 09:46 by morten