Administrative web interface

Each BOINC project has an administrative web interface that lets you

• Browse the database
• Screen user profiles
• Administer "special users" (e.g., forum moderators)
• Create and edit applications and app versions
• Send mass email to users (note: a more flexible way of doing this is described here).
• Send emails to users with malfunctioning hosts.
• See a distribution of how many FLOPs results are using.
• Cancel workunits
• View recent results, and analyze failures
• Browse stripcharts
• Browse log files

If your project's URL is ​http://a.b.c/test, then the URL of the admin web interface is ​http://a.b.c/test_ops. The directory containing the admin pages is ~/projects/test/html/ops/.

Because the admin interface lets you do things like see user email addresses, it's extremely important that it be secure. There are two levels of protection:

Protection by .htaccess

When a project is created, a file html/ops/.htaccess is created that disallows access to the admin web interface. You can use htpasswd to create a .htpasswd file containing credentials for yourself:

htpasswd -c .htpasswd username

Project-defined protection policy

The config file html/project/project.inc can specify a function auth_ops() that defines a project-specific policy for protecting the admin interface. Possible policies:

• Access only if logged in as user from a given list.
• Access only to users with ADMIN or DEV flag set in forum_preferences.privileges.
• Access only from specific IP addresses.
• Any other policy you can think of.

Some examples are given in the function auth_ops_example() in the default config file.