Shared Access for Your DCS Servers
Invite other users into a NimbusPulse server and decide exactly what they can view, manage, and change.
Share server access safely
It’s now possible to share access to your DCS server with anyone from your community, squadron, or wing. This is a big step forward in terms of security, usability, and accountability. In the past, we’ve noticed account sharing, which we don’t forbid, but it comes with many risks for server operators, such as oversharing, having no insight into who is doing what on the server, and more.
How shared access works
You can manage access for each user on your server’s control panel page, called “Shared Access”. On that page, the server owner can add new users who can view and act on the server from their own account. Only the server owner can manage these users, and the email must be registered on NimbusPulse, but the user does not need to have bought anything.
There are many sharing options to choose from for each user. For now, these are:
| Permission Name | Description |
|---|---|
| instance:view | The user can see all read-only parts of your server, like events, statistics, etc. |
| instance:actions | Basic actions for your server. These include start, stop, restart, etc. |
| instance:chat | Access to writing messages from the chat window. |
| instance:players:manage | Access to kick/ban players on the players page. |
| instance:missions | Access to the missions page and all its functions. |
| instance:settings | Permission to save settings on the Settings page. |
| instance:infrastructure | Access to the infrastructure page and all its subpages. |
| instance:mods | Access to the mod settings pages and all their subpages. |
| instance:scheduled_tasks | Access to the “Scheduled Tasks” page and all its functions. |
| instance:file:read | Access to the “File Manager” page, without write/delete access. This also adds access to the “Console” page, since it uses the same API. |
| instance:file:write | Access to write/delete on the “File Manager” page. |
Owner-only controls
As mentioned before, there are a few functions that only the server owner has. These are:
- Access to the “Shared Access” page itself
- Delete Server / Cancel or Renew subscription buttons, depending on the server’s billing type
We limit these functions to be accessible only to the owner, since these are actions that only the owner should be able to take.
Track who did what
In larger communities, more and more users might need access to your server. This creates a new challenge: knowing which action was taken by whom to eliminate confusion.
You can see this in many places, like events and the file manager audit log. For events, it now tracks which user triggered each event to identify server starts, stops, restarts, and more. The audit logs are coming a bit later, but we are already tracking this on our backend. It will soon be accessible on the file manager page.
Permission-based API tokens
The Shared Access feature also laid the foundation for permission-based API tokens, to limit what a given API token can see and do. This feature is coming in the near future.