About security modes

The security system for your project has several possible security modes. You can configure your groups and users locally, in your own project settings, or you can get predefined groups and users from another project or a domain server.

This software currently supports four security modes:

Local Only

This is the standard mode for most projects: when you create groups and users for your project, they are valid for your project only and are not shared in any way. The security system configuration is saved entirely within your project settings.

Distributed – Server

This mode is similar to Local Only, except that the security system configuration is also made available to other projects on the same network. Any projects that want to get the configuration simply need to have Distributed – Client selected as their security mode. Also, if the "server" project loses its security system configuration for some reason, it can reimport that configuration from one of its "client" projects.

Distributed – Client

This mode is the counterpart to Distributed – Server, and when it is selected, the "client" project gets its entire security system configuration from a specified "server" project on the same network. Also, the "client" project caches this configuration and can continue to run even if it loses communication with the "server" project.

Local Plus Domain (LDAP)

This mode combines the configurability of Local Only with the features of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which is a recognized standard for managing groups and users across many different applications on a network. This type of network is also known as a domain. LDAP-compliant domain servers include Microsoft Active Directory for Windows and OpenLDAP for Linux.

When this mode is selected, you can configure your project's security system to be a mix of both locally created and network managed groups and users. Also, with some additional work, you can save that configuration back to the domain server in order to share it with other projects on the same network.