Hi Everyone,
I believe the Ignition Perspective module uses IIS and it isn’t an underlying RDP session to connect to the Web Server. For one of our projects, we plan on using an existing AD for user authentication and I believe in this case we do require Windows CALs for active SCADA users. Is that assumption correct? I am sure people must have come across this question before but I am just trying to get a clear answer for this. Any information or feedback is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Zeeshan
No Windows or Microsoft technologies are involved in Perspective. You’re not the first person who has thought IIS is involved… I wonder where that’s coming from.
A Perspective ‘session’ is a real (HTML-in-browser) page (created using React), which connects via a websocket to the backend session running on the gateway. That low-latency, high-bandwidth websocket is how we’re able to run scripts and expressions.
Ignition has the capacity to connect to Active Directory to fetch user information, but only for the somewhat-legacy ‘User Source’ model. Perspective authentication uses ‘Identity Providers’ (often abbreviated IdP); Ignition itself can act as an IdP (using users in a user source), or you can connect Ignition to another IdP entirely and use that for Perspective.
If CAL is ‘Client-Access-License’, it’s almost totally irrelevant to Ignition. We don’t hook into Windows’ licensing or really care about it at all. Perspective can, by nature, run entirely in any modern web browser. You can choose to install Perspective Workstation for a more ‘native’ application feel, but it’s not required.
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Great! This helps clarify things a lot for me, I appreciate the detailed response. Yep, by CAL I was referring to the Client-Access-License.