Client Security

[dagar]

Is there any method for introducing rights/privileges to Sage clients? I call myself searching but

e.g.: I don't want my kids or guests to delete programs but they can watch any live TV, media or play DVDs.

e.g.: They can't watch live TV only recorded shows, vis-a-vis a filtered list, and certain 'media' files and the DVD drive is locked to them.

e.g.: Users must enter their pwd (pin) to access, otherwise they get reduced 'guest' privileges.

[Cayars]

No nothing like this currently exists.

I've been looking at the code to implement some of these things.

As a quick first pass, it would be more or less straight forward to have a quick 3 tiered user system. 1 being GUEST, 2 being NORMAL and 3 being ADMIN.

All of the main menu items could be set with an access level as above. When the system has just loaded it would default to GUEST. You could then enter an access code to gain NORMAL or ADMIN rights. It could be set to timeout back to GUEST after a certain time period of inactivity or you could manually switch it back to any other level.

This would get you part way there. It would be more difficult to go further then this at present without some type of integration into SageTV as a whole with company support.

You could probably piggy-back off the parental rights settings to only list shows/movies that do not need a PIN code at present. This would atleast keep objectionable shows from being listed. I suppose you could throw another user type "ADULT" in there between "NORMAL" and "ADMIN" for this purpose.

What would get complicated quickly is stopping files from getting deleted. It would not be too hard to remove the "Delete" buttons, BUT once the show was watched it would fall into normal house-cleaning and could get deleted that way since it has been viewed.

All of the main menu choices could be setup for a particular access level via a NEW branch in Detailed Setup.

I'll add this onto my list of TO DOs for my custom STV. I'll have to figure out how to do this with the dynamic menu system however.

Carlo

[dagar]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll be happy to help troubleshoot it when it's ready.

The other thing that would need to be block (just on general principle) is the 'Setup' menu.

[Lester Jacobs]

I concur with the original poster. Security is a feature that I mentioned in these forums many months ago as being very important (maybe even serve as a differentiator from other PVR software). I'll like to see it not only in clients but in the server as well. In a house with kids, and a PVR with limited tuners, one could solve a lot of arguments by having a well thought out secuity architecture. As well, I think security should be delivered as part of the core feature set, not implemented in an STV. It should not be possible for people to bypass security settings simply by using another STV (however I can live with an STV only implementation I suppose). Another problem with implementation in an STV is that in order to get security, I might have to choose a particular STV even though I don't the other functionality that comes bundled with it.

In any case, in addition to what dagar mentioned, I'd like to see these other areas covered by security:

1) Favourite priority: A user with a certain security level should not be able to override favourite priorities set by users with a higher security level. E.g. littlle Johnny should not be able to assign "Barney" a higher recording priority than "Biography" no matter how much he loves his Barney episodes

2) Cancelling favourite recordings: A user with low security access should not be able to interrupt a favourite or manual recording assigned by a higher security level user in order to watch Live TV (Sage should not even show the switch dialog). ASIDE: This point could be addressed another way if Sage officially supported using non hardware encoding cards as LiveTV only cards so that there was always a tuner available for Live TV.

3) Recording deletions: Users should not be able to delete recordings created by a user with higher access. However, SageTV should delete recordings using its normal space management algorithms as per normal provided that a recording can only be automatically deleted if it is being replaced by a recording created by a user of equal or higher priority (or a user of equal or higher priority needs the space to watch Live TV).

4) The security mechanism should be implemented in such a way that users can be switched "on the fly" Pressing a particular button on the remote should display a dialog containing a list of users, selecting one of these users and entering a PIN should cause the system to immediately switch to that user or access level. Preferably, PINs should be limited to numeric only making it easier to switch using only the number pad on a remote.

5) After a set period of time, security settings should default to the setting with the lowest privilege (or to some other setting specified in the security setup). This prevents the system being accidentally left in Admin mode for instance.

That's all I can think of for now,

Lester

[McTurok]

Well, if you are going to setup or design user settings, I would think you'd also want to setup and design screens for those users.

1. Admin (everything)
2. Guests (Just see playable recordings and/or music/media library, etc. - no delete)
3. Kids (Just recordings - no delete)

Anyone know if any other software has this ability?
Sage could be the first?