STV Import: Restricted Access STV

[Lester Jacobs]

Works very nicely. Thank you for the update. It's great to be finally able to easily restrict kids and guests from changing my Sage configuration and deleting files (typically by accident), while not creating too onerous a security mechanism.

Cheers
Lester

[tmiranda]

You're welcome. And thanks for the testing help.

Tom

[RodEvan]

Well it wasn't going to be long before someone asked the question.

But first I want you to know that as a foster carers, the plug has been invaluable almost essential really, and easily enough to persuade me to return to the stock STV after using SageMC for a while. Your hard work is much appreciated.

and I have to ask.... any plans to implement this for Version 7?

[tmiranda]

Ron,

I just returned from a business trip and have not yet wrapped my head arounf this. I will most likely port it, but I have no clue on a timeframe right now.

Tom

[sic0048]

Don't forget that you can manually install addons in V7 the same way we installed things in V6. V7 added the plugin library, but they didn't take out the old method of installing STVs. While there is a chance that a STV won't work in V7, I suspect that most will work if you manually install it.

[Lester Jacobs]

Let me add my voice by saying that this plugin has been invaluable. In a house with kids and friends of kids the likelihood of having inadvertently deleted files or changed configurations is high. This plugin gives me the ability to provide the kids with entertainment while preserving my peace of mind knowing that the system is relatively secure against accidents and tampering.

I have been pestering the SageTV devs off and on for years for just this sort of thing. I can certainly say that I will not be putting SageTV 7 on my production box until this plugin is available.

I would pitch in and help with porting it to SageTV 7 but my available development bandwidth for non-work projects has been almost non-existent for a while now for various reasons. However I would be happy to beta test.

Cheers
Lester

[tmiranda]

Lester,

Porting this STVi can best be described as easy, but very time consuming. I have to manually search for all of the places in the STV where user actions are taken and "trap" every one of them and check if the action should be allowed. Think about it, there are hundreds of menu choices, options dialogs, setup parameters, keystrokes, and button presses that need to be captured.

The STVi also breaks easily if there are changes in the UI.

I've not ported it yet because I want to make sure the new UI is stable so I don't end up fixing it as the UI changes during the beta cycle. I also want to wait to see if the Malore Menus are updated to the new look and feel.

It's certainly on the list of "to do's", but I only want to do it once.

Tom

[Lester Jacobs]

I hear you. I know well how many places need to be changed since I took a stab at this permission restriction functionality many years ago. Your effort is light years ahead of mine though. At the time I tried to convince the Sage devs to add an enhancement to the API where any of the config, delete, record, favourite, etc functions would call a predefined "checkPermission" function and not execute if the result of the "checkPermission" was false. In the stock install this "checkPermission" function would do nothing but a developer could overload it using a Java class to do whatever checks were needed. This would have eliminated the manual work involved in searching the stock STV for all of the trap points and would have been a generic solution that supported pretty much any custom STV or STVi. However such a function did not fit into their design plans at the time.

Cheers
Lester

[tmiranda]

I just ported this to Sage7. If you have questions or problems please post in the Sage7 customization thread: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=50319

[DoPeFiSh]

Hi, I have sagetv 7 and I installed this plugin and it worked fine for a few days then it wont recognize my password, not sure if someone changed it on me or what happened, I enter the password and it wont take it, I tried uninstalling the plugin and re-installing it and it still asks for the password, this is on the main tivo not the placeshifter.

What is the file that the password is stored so I can see what it is if it got changed? or just delete the file so I can start clean.......

Thanks

[tmiranda]

It's stored in the .properties file in plain text so it won't be hard to find. Just shutdown sage and open the .properties file in a text editor. I forget the exact name of the property but it will start with "rra/". Once you look at the properties file it should be obvious.

Don't delete the password. Just change it to something you can remember.

Tom

[DoPeFiSh]

Thank you, I found it, it looks like for some reason it changed it to upper case or when I entered it in it was on upper case I guess...... I enter it with the remote and nothing, I entered it with the keyboard in upper case and it works, I changed it in the sage.properties file to lower case but it still didn't take it, unless its in multiple properties files, I could remove it and try again ?

[tmiranda]

The password is saved on a per-client (or per-extender) basis so you will have to change it in multiple .properties files.