(I also considered the names "capabilities" and "scopes", but I think
"permissions" is the most widely understood.)
This is increasingly necessary as the web API becomes more capable.
Among other things, it allows:
* non-administrator users who can view but not access camera passwords
or change any state
* workers that update signal state based on cameras' built-in motion
detection or a security system's events but don't need to view videos
* control over what can be done without authenticating
Currently session permissions are just copied from user permissions, but
you can also imagine admin sessions vs not, as a checkbox when signing
in. This would match the standard Unix workflow of using a
non-administrative session most of the time.
Relevant to my current signals work (#28) and to the addition of an
administrative API (#35, including #66).
This is a definite work in progress. In particular,
* there's no src/web.rs support yet so it can't be used,
* the code is surprisingly complex, and there's almost no tests so far.
I want to at least get complete branch coverage.
* I may still go back to time_sec rather than time_90k to save RAM and
flash.
I simplified the approach a bit from the earlier goal in design/api.md.
In particular, there's no longer the separate concept of "observation"
vs "prediction". Now the predictions are just observations that extend a
bit beyond now. They may be flushed prematurely and I'll try living with
that to avoid making things even more complex.
This is mostly untested and useless by itself, but it's a starting
point. In particular:
* there's no way to set up signals or add/remove/update events yet
except by manual changes to the database.
* if you associate a signal with a camera then remove the camera,
hitting /api/ will error out.
This is so far completely untested, for use by a new UI prototype.
It creates a new URL endpoint which sends one video/mp4 media segment
per key frame, with the dependent frames included. This means there will
be about one key frame interval of latency (typically about a second).
This seems hard to avoid, as mentioned in issue #59.
Fixes#46. If there are no video_sample_entries, it returns
InvalidArgument, which gets mapped to a HTTP 400. Various other failures
turn into non-500s as well.
There are many places that can & should be using typed errors, but it's
a start.
This is mostly just "cargo fix --edition" + Cargo.toml changes.
There's one fix for upgrading to NLL in db/writer.rs:
Writer::previously_opened wouldn't build with NLL because of a
double-borrow the previous borrow checker somehow didn't catch.
Restructure to avoid it.
I'll put elective NLL changes in a following commit.
The guide is not as quick to follow and amateur-friendly as I'd like. A
few things that might improve matters:
* complete #27 (built-in https+letsencrypt), so that when not sharing
the port, users don't need to use nginx or certbot.
* more ubiquitous IPv6 (out of my control but should happen over
time) to reduce need to share the port
* embed a dynamic DNS client
* support UPnP Internet Gateway Device Control Protocol (if common
routers have this enabled? probably not for security reasons.)
It's progress, though. Enough that I think I'll merge the auth branch
into master shortly.
I initially chose SameSite=Lax because I thought if a user followed a
link to the landing page, the landing page's ajax requests wouldn't send
the cookie. But I just did an experiment, and that's not true. Only the
initial page load (of a .html file) lacks the cookie. All of its
resources and ajax requests send the cookie. I'm not sure about
document.cookie accesses, but my cookie is HttpOnly anyway, so it's
irrelevant. So no reason to be lax.
Some caveats:
* it doesn't record the peer IP yet, which makes it harder to verify
sessions are valid. This is a little annoying to do in hyper now
(see hyperium/hyper#1410). The direct peer might not be what we want
right now anyway because there's no TLS support yet (see #27). In
the meantime, the sane way to expose Moonfire NVR to the Internet is
via a proxy server, and recording the proxy's IP is not useful.
Maybe better to interpret a RFC 7239 Forwarded header (and/or
the older X-Forwarded-{For,Proto} headers).
* it doesn't ever use Secure (https-only) cookies, for a similar reason.
It's not safe to use even with a tls proxy until this is fixed.
* there's no "moonfire-nvr config" support for inspecting/invalidating
sessions yet.
* in debug builds, logging in is crazy slow. See libpasta/libpasta#9.
Some notes:
* I removed the Javascript "no-use-before-defined" lint, as some of
the functions form a cycle.
* Fixed#20 along the way. I needed to add support for properly
returning non-OK HTTP statuses to signal unauthorized and such.
* I removed the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header support, which was
at odds with the "SameSite=lax" in the cookie header. The "yarn
start" method for running a local proxy server accomplishes the same
thing as the Access-Control-Allow-Origin support in a more secure
manner.
Fixes#60
The reqwest dependency is significant because the old version required
an old version of openssl, complicating compilation on newer platforms.
reqwest also pulled in old/duplicate versions of hyper, tokio, etc.
Nice to drop a lot of that cruft.
I left rusqlite and uuid alone because they had breaking changes I
didn't want to mess with at the moment.
Bumped the minimum Rust version to 1.30.0, as required by the
new encoding_rs crate (and perhaps other things).
I want to use hyper::server::Request::bytes_mut(), so an update is
needed. Update everything at once. Most notably, the http-serve update
starts using the http crate types for some things. (More to come.)
The new behavior eliminates a couple unpleasant edge cases in which it
would never flush:
* if all recording stops, whatever was unflushed would stay that way
* if every recording attempt produces a 0-duration recording (such as if the
camera sends only one frame and thus no PTS delta can be calculated),
the list of recordings to flush would continue to grow
There may be considerable lag between being fully written and being committed
when using the flush_if_sec feature. Additionally, this is a step toward
listing and viewing recordings before they're fully written. That's a
considerable delay: 60 to 120 seconds for the first recording of a run,
0 to 60 seconds for subsequent recordings.
These recordings aren't yet included in the information returned by
/api/?days=true. They probably should be, but small steps.
I want to start having the db.rs version augment this with the uncommitted
recordings, and it's nice to have the separation of the raw db vs augmented
versions. Also, this fits with the general theme of shrinking db.rs a bit.
I had to put the raw video_sample_entry_id into the rows rather than
the video_sample_entry Arc. In hindsight, this is better anyway: the common
callers don't need to do the btree lookup and arc clone on every row. I think
I'd originally done it that way only because I was quite new to rust and
didn't understand that db could be used from within the row callback given
that both borrows are immutable.
I mistakenly thought these had to be monomorphized. (The FnOnce still
does, until rust-lang/rfcs#1909 is implemented.) Turns out this way works
fine. It should result in less compile time / code size, though I didn't check
this.
It should reduce compile time / memory usage to put quite a bit of the code
into a separate crate. I also intend to limit visibility of some things to
only within the db crate, but that's for a future change. This is the smallest
move that will compile.
The filenames now represent composite ids (stream id + recording id) rather
than a separate uuid system with its own reservation for a few benefits:
* This provides more information when there are inconsistencies.
* This avoids the need for managing the reservations during recording. I
expect this to simplify delaying flushing of newly written sample files.
Now the directory has to be scanned at startup for files that never got
written to the database, but that's acceptably fast even with millions of
files.
* Less information to keep in memory and in the recording_playback table.
I'd considered using one directory per stream, which might help if the
filesystem has trouble coping with huge directories. But that would mean each
dir has to be fsync()ed separately (more latency and/or more multithreading).
So I'll stick with this until I see concrete evidence of a problem that would
solve.
Test coverage of the error conditions is poor. I plan to do some restructuring
of the db/dir code, hopefully making steps toward testability along the way.
The idea is to avoid the problems described in src/schema.proto; those
possibilities have bothered me for a while. A bonus is that (in a future
commit) it can replace the sample file uuid scheme in favor of using
<camera_uuid>-<stream_type>/<recording_id> for several advantages:
* on data integrity problems (specifically, extra sample files), more
information to use to understand what happened.
* no more reserving sample files prior to using them. This avoids some extra
database transactions on startup (now there's an extra two total rather
than an extra one per stream). It also simplifies an upcoming change I
want to make in which some streams are not flushed immediately, reducing
the write load significantly (maybe one per minute total rather than one
per stream per minute).
* get rid of eight bytes per playback cache entry in RAM (and nine bytes
per recording_playback row on flash).
The implementation is still pretty rough in places:
* Lack of tests.
* Poor ode organization. In particular, SampleFileDirectory::write_meta
shouldn't be exposed beyond db. I'm thinking about moving db.rs and
SampleFileDirectory to a new crate, moonfire_nvr_db. This would improve
compile times as well.
* No tooling for renaming a sample file directory.
* Config subcommand still panics in conditions that can be reasonably
expected to happen.
This is still pretty basic support. There's no config UI support for
renaming/moving the sample file directories after they are created, and no
error checking that the files are still in the expected place. I can imagine
sysadmins getting into trouble trying to change things. I hope to address at
least some of that in a follow-up change to introduce a versioning/locking
scheme that ensures databases and sample file dirs match in some way.
A bonus change that kinda got pulled along for the ride: a dialog pops up in
the config UI while a stream is being tested. The experience was pretty bad
before; there was no indication the button worked at all until it was done,
sometimes many seconds later.
This allows each camera to have a main and a sub stream. Previously there was
a field in the schema for the sub stream's url, but it didn't do anything. Now
you can configure individual retention for main and sub streams. They show up
grouped in the UI.
No support for upgrading from schema version 1 yet.
This is a wash in terms of lines of code now, but it makes it a bit easier to
maintain as I make changes to the schema (such as separating out streams from
cameras), and it helps ensure the tests reflect reality.
The Javascript is pretty amateurish I'm sure but at least it's something to
iterate from. It's already much more pleasant for browsing through videos in
several ways:
* more responsive to load only a day at a time rather than 90+ days
* much easier to see the same time segment on several cameras
* more pleasant to have the videos load as a popup rather than a link
that blows away your position in an enormous list
* exposes the fancier .mp4 generation options: splitting at lengths
other than the default, trimming to an arbitrary start and end time,
including a subtitle track with timestamps.
There's a slight regression in functionality: I didn't match the former
top-level page which showed how much camera used of its disk allocation and
the total duration of video. This is exposed in the JSON API, so it shouldn't
be too hard to add back.
This is intended to support HTML5 Media Source Extensions, which I expect to
be the most practical way to make a good web UI with a proper scrub bar and
such.
This feature has had very limited testing on Chrome and Firefox, and that was
not entirely successful. More work is needed before it's usable, but this
seems like a helpful progress checkpoint.
