What will the NetAuth server contain, and when will it contain it. These are important questions to ask and set expectations for what will exist at each version. So lets do that now:
Version 0.0.1:
This is going to be all about the MVP (Minimum Viable Product). So for this to work, there needs to be a way to add and remove entities and to authenticate them using some secret information. There should also be some limited meta-data available here, such as internal permissions for who can create and remove things on the server itself. There should probably also be some way to see what’s going on in the server, so we’ll want the ability to list entities. Might as well implement that as basic grouping support.
Version 0.0.2:
Now its time to start adding some features. First off, the superuser from the first version should now be able to change secrets for unprivileged entities. Also a good idea to support some real metadata now.
NetAuth won’t go as far as OpenLDAP in terms of data flexibility, but it will need to store some metadata about entities in the system. This will be accomplished as a section within the entity structure for metadata and it needs to be written to. Since we’ve got a superuser concept, they can edit this as well as the entity its written on.
Oh, and this version should probably stop storing everything in memory, so a way to write things to the disk would be good. This should be a pluggable system so that in the future when people complain that its not good they can write a plugin that implements whatever storage system will make them go away^W^W happy.
Version 0.0.3:
Groups should do more in this release. They should first of all exist as more than just a single group that contains everything. Entities should be movable to put into and take out of groups, and you should be able to find out what group an entity is in.
Cluster support should come in as well. After all it won’t do much good to build an authentication source that can’t be replicated. Just try explaining to the boss that the network is down because your single, non-redundant authentication server had a problem. Clustering is quite hard though, so in this version we’ll cheat and just make the data storage layer safe to sync between multiple servers.
Version 0.0.4:
Groups should do more. Groups should be nestable. Not nestable though in the sense that returning a group in a client shows you it contains groups though, that makes for complicated clients. The groups should do the expansions server-side so that if group foo includes group bar, then foo contains bar’s members directly in the response to a membership query.
If we can include groups, lets also make it possible to exclude memberships based on groups. Thus if you have membership in foo and in bar, but foo excludes bar, then you don’t show up in the membership of foo even though you have it as a direct group membership.
Version 0.0.5:
Doing everything with a global superuser doesn’t scale, so that should be fixed. We already have the capability system that’s used to check if a user is the superuser. Lets add lots more capabilities to this and use those to give finer grained control on actions within the server. This will let the systems administrator create service users for things like password reset that have limited permissions.
By the time we make it this far, there should be something releasable. That being said, don’t be surprised if more versions crop up between here and 0.1.0.
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