Administration

In the following chapter we explain the inner workings of Æther including monitoring and usermanagement.

Managing User accounts

User management is done through a centralized LDAP server which is connected to:

  • Nextcloud

  • Postfix (MTA, through dovecot)

  • Dovecot (MDA)

  • Mailman (Malinglists)

  • Grafana (Monitoring)

Users can be added to groups which grant access to different services:

admin

Users in this group are granted administrative rights to mailman and can login to the monitoring system.

lldap_admin

Users in this group can create other users and groups in lldap.

lldap_password_manager

This group is only meant for services that need to query information from the LDAP server.

lldap_strict_readonly

Same as above.

mail

Users in this group have an standard email address.

mailman

Users in this group have access to mailman.

nextcloud

This group grants access to nextcloud.

staff

This group is meant to give access to user management or mailinglist management without being able to change system settings.

Creating New Accounts

New user accounts can be created via the webinterface at https://auth.naturbeobachtung.de. Don’t set a password during creation, instead use the password reset form to generate an email that gets sent to the users address. After creation, groups can be added at the bottom of the user detail page.

Deleting Accounts

Accounts can be deleted via the user overview page. Once deleted only the account on the lldap server is gone. Mailboxes and files in Nextcloud still exist on disk and have to be deleted manually if desired.

Monitoring

In order to make sure all services are operating smoothly, Æther collects non user specific metrics about the system. E.g. CPU and memory usage, list and status of all processes, number of sent emails, number of requests to the webserver. These metrics can be accessed at: https://monitoring.naturbeobachtung.de. Via alerts it is possible to receive emails if certain parameters are outside of specified limits.