Security and MongoDB

The MongoDB Security Model has some scope for improvement.

1. As default, Authentication is off. MongoDB is designed to run in a 'trusted' environment, depending on the network configuration to ensure the security of the environment.
2. Pre v2 authentication is not supported within a sharded deployment.
3. Once authenticated a user has full read-write to the entire DB. There is no concept of roles or groups or such like.

Now, I wanted to deploy with Security turned up to the max, so here I will present a practical example.

This is a typical set-up I'd use for my development environment; separate machines each running mongod.

Firstly, let's set up the replicaset.
On the primary we can define and run the replicaset config:

Nothing fancy here, all standard stuff. After a few minutes the dust settles and the primary and secondary identify themselves. You can check the status of the replicaset with:

Now, on each box in the replicaset you'll need to create a key (must be valid Base64 and 1K or less):

You can now bring down both instances. Either hit ctrl+c or do it the right way:

Now we can start each of the mongod instances with the keyFile:

Word of warning here. I spent a significant amount of time trying to set this up on v2.0.0 - yes I know it is a bit dumb to go with a x.0.0 version, but you'd think that something as basic/fundamental as this would be thoroughly tested. Well, suffice to say I ended up moving to the latest binary to get this basic functionality to work. It was annoying at the time, but it certainly made me read the available documentation multiple times.
So now on the primary we can create the admin user aka root, super...

As we have a replicaset these users will existing in admin and mydb on both instances.

This whole process should take about 5 minutes to configure provided you're using a stable, well tested version.

I got unlucky and wasted hours on a buggy version grappling with errors that I couldn't decipher, feeling a bit denvercoder9 (http://xkcd.com/979/).

I went through the pain so you don't have to...