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 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 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 24 hours???

If you will have many NAV users, consider using LDAP. LDAP is configured in the webfront/webfront.conf. LDAP configuration and usage is documented here. A brief explanation follows:

The way LDAP works with NAV is that if a user is not defined manually in the NAV user account base, NAV will use LDAP. The user will then be stored locally in addition, also with password information. Next time the user logs in, LDAP is still used for authentication, if the password is changed in LDAP, the local NAV user base will be updated. If LDAP one day does not respond, the NAV user will still get access to NAV with its local cached user name and password! We find this more robust, which is of utmost importance for a tool monitoring the network infrastructure (if the tool does not work when part of the network is down, we have a problem).

The toolbox lists all the NAV tools with a brief explaination and lets you navigate to your tool of interest.

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 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.)

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.

/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.

webfront.log gives information on failed logins and other issues. This log file is not there per default, Morten knows what to do