User Guide

302 Chapter 12 Configuring ColdFusion Clusters
Administrating Security
When you enable ClusterCATS administration security for a specific cluster, only
authorized users are able to access and administer that cluster using their
ClusterCATS Explorer (Windows) or the ClusterCATS Web Explorer (UNIX).
ClusterCATS provides three administration security settings for securing your server
cluster environment:
• Disabled Authentication
This is the default setting. It provides no security challenge, and therefore anyone
can access the server cluster with a ClusterCATS administration tool or even a
Web browser and modify your cluster environment.
• Local User Authentication
This is the recommended security setting for most clusters residing in small to
mid-sized organizations that have only a few administrators. This setting
provides a security challenge for anyone accessing the server. The authentication
is based on administrative privileges that you define for specific users on each
server in the cluster.
• Windows NT Domain Authentication (Windows NT Only)
You may want to use this security setting if your organization is fairly large and
contains many distributed administrator groups that need to access your server
clusters. To use this setting, you must define your global administrators’ group in
the form “
BT_clustername”, where clustername is the exact name of the cluster
you created with the ClusterCATS Explorer. The global administrators group must
exist within the same domain as the clustered servers.
This section describes the following:
• “Configuring authentication on Windows” on page 302
• “Configuring authentication on UNIX” on page 306
Configuring authentication on Windows
The following sections describe how to enable the type of authentication most
appropriate for your environment.
• “Configuring local-user authentication” on page 302
• “Configuring Windows NT domain authentication” on page 304
Configuring local-user authentication
Local-user authentication lets ClusterCATS authenticate specific users on a
per-server basis. Local users of a server must have an account on the server where
the Web server resides.
For example, if a cluster includes several Web servers and you only have an account
on one, then you can only administer that server.