(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.
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.
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
This is only the database schema, which I'm adding now in the hopes of
freezing schema version 3. There's no way yet to create users, much less
actually authenticate.
These are not actually populated by the code yet. I'm trying to get the
v3 schema frozen as soon as possible; actually using the fields can come
later.
Add some explanation of their value in time.md, along with some general
musing on leap seconds, and a correction on the frequency error of my cameras.
I want to be able to use it in etags without having to do a full scan of the
recording_playback in advance, which would greatly increase time to first
byte. I probably will even use it in urls to ensure the segments they point to
are stable. I haven't actually done this yet - it will wait until I implement
serving unflushed recordings - but I want to get the schema set up properly.
As noted in schema.sql, this can be used for disambiguation. It also may be
useful in diagnosing data integrity problems.
Also, sneak in a couple minor improvements: better diagnostics in a couple
places, fix to 1->2 upgrade procedure.
This improves the practicality of having many streams (including the doubling
of streams by having main + sub streams for each camera). With these tuned
properly, extra streams don't cause any extra write cycles in normal or error
cases. Consider the worst case in which each RTSP session immediately sends a
single frame and then fails. Moonfire retries every second, so this would
formerly cause one commit per second per stream. (flush_if_sec=0 preserves
this behavior.) Now the commits can be arbitrarily infrequent by setting
higher values of flush_if_sec.
WARNING: this isn't production-ready! I hacked up dir.rs to make tests pass
and "moonfire-nvr run" work in the best-case scenario, but it doesn't handle
errors gracefully. I've been debating what to do when writing a recording
fails. I considered "abandoning" the recording then either reusing or skipping
its id. (in the latter case, marking the file as garbage if it can't be
unlinked immediately). I think now there's no point in abandoning a recording.
If I can't write to that file, there's no reason to believe another will work
better. It's better to retry that recording forever, and perhaps put the whole
directory into an error state that stops recording until those writes go
through. I'm planning to redesign dir.rs to make this happen.
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.
