User Management

User Configuration

User management

Proxmox Backup Server supports several authentication realms, and you need to choose the realm when you add a new user. Possible realms are:

pam:Linux PAM standard authentication. Use this if you want to authenticate as Linux system user (Users need to exist on the system).
pbs:Proxmox Backup Server realm. This type stores hashed passwords in /etc/proxmox-backup/shadow.json.

After installation, there is a single user root@pam, which corresponds to the Unix superuser. User configuration information is stored in the file /etc/proxmox-backup/user.cfg. You can use the proxmox-backup-manager command line tool to list or manipulate users:

# proxmox-backup-manager user list
┌─────────────┬────────┬────────┬───────────┬──────────┬────────────────┬────────────────────┐
│ userid      │ enable │ expire │ firstname │ lastname │ email          │ comment            │
╞═════════════╪════════╪════════╪═══════════╪══════════╪════════════════╪════════════════════╡
│ root@pam    │      1 │        │           │          │                │ Superuser          │
└─────────────┴────────┴────────┴───────────┴──────────┴────────────────┴────────────────────┘
Add a new user

The superuser has full administration rights on everything, so you normally want to add other users with less privileges. You can create a new user with the user create subcommand or through the web interface, under Configuration -> User Management. The create subcommand lets you specify many options like --email or --password. You can update or change any user properties using the update subcommand later (Edit in the GUI):

# proxmox-backup-manager user create john@pbs --email john@example.com
# proxmox-backup-manager user update john@pbs --firstname John --lastname Smith
# proxmox-backup-manager user update john@pbs --comment "An example user."

The resulting user list looks like this:

# proxmox-backup-manager user list
┌──────────┬────────┬────────┬───────────┬──────────┬──────────────────┬──────────────────┐
│ userid   │ enable │ expire │ firstname │ lastname │ email            │ comment          │
╞══════════╪════════╪════════╪═══════════╪══════════╪══════════════════╪══════════════════╡
│ john@pbs │      1 │        │ John      │ Smith    │ john@example.com │ An example user. │
├──────────┼────────┼────────┼───────────┼──────────┼──────────────────┼──────────────────┤
│ root@pam │      1 │        │           │          │                  │ Superuser        │
└──────────┴────────┴────────┴───────────┴──────────┴──────────────────┴──────────────────┘

Newly created users do not have any permissions. Please read the next section to learn how to set access permissions.

If you want to disable a user account, you can do that by setting --enable to 0

# proxmox-backup-manager user update john@pbs --enable 0

Or completely remove the user with:

# proxmox-backup-manager user remove john@pbs

Access Control

By default new users do not have any permission. Instead you need to specify what is allowed and what is not. You can do this by assigning roles to users on specific objects like datastores or remotes. The following roles exist:

NoAccess
Disable Access - nothing is allowed.
Admin
Can do anything.
Audit
Can view things, but is not allowed to change settings.
DatastoreAdmin
Can do anything on datastores.
DatastoreAudit
Can view datastore settings and list content. But is not allowed to read the actual data.
DatastoreReader
Can Inspect datastore content and can do restores.
DatastoreBackup
Can backup and restore owned backups.
DatastorePowerUser
Can backup, restore, and prune owned backups.
RemoteAdmin
Can do anything on remotes.
RemoteAudit
Can view remote settings.
RemoteSyncOperator
Is allowed to read data from a remote.
Add permissions for user

Access permission information is stored in /etc/proxmox-backup/acl.cfg. The file contains 5 fields, separated using a colon (‘:’) as a delimiter. A typical entry takes the form:

acl:1:/datastore:john@pbs:DatastoreBackup

The data represented in each field is as follows:

  1. acl identifier
  2. A 1 or 0, representing whether propagation is enabled or disabled, respectively
  3. The object on which the permission is set. This can be a specific object (single datastore, remote, etc.) or a top level object, which with propagation enabled, represents all children of the object also.
  4. The user for which the permission is set
  5. The role being set

You can manage datastore permissions from Configuration -> Permissions in the web interface. Likewise, you can use the acl subcommand to manage and monitor user permissions from the command line. For example, the command below will add the user john@pbs as a DatastoreAdmin for the datastore store1, located at /backup/disk1/store1:

# proxmox-backup-manager acl update /datastore/store1 DatastoreAdmin --userid john@pbs

You can monitor the roles of each user using the following command:

# proxmox-backup-manager acl list
┌──────────┬──────────────────┬───────────┬────────────────┐
│ ugid     │ path             │ propagate │ roleid         │
╞══════════╪══════════════════╪═══════════╪════════════════╡
│ john@pbs │ /datastore/disk1 │         1 │ DatastoreAdmin │
└──────────┴──────────────────┴───────────┴────────────────┘

A single user can be assigned multiple permission sets for different datastores.

Note

Naming convention is important here. For datastores on the host, you must use the convention /datastore/{storename}. For example, to set permissions for a datastore mounted at /mnt/backup/disk4/store2, you would use /datastore/store2 for the path. For remote stores, use the convention /remote/{remote}/{storename}, where {remote} signifies the name of the remote (see Remote below) and {storename} is the name of the datastore on the remote.