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Ghostwriter Admin

Some notes on basic Ghostwriter administration - creation of clients, projects, etc.

Accounts and permissions

A Ghostwriter manager account allows creation of clients and projects. Normal users cannot create clients or projects (but they can create a report once given access to a project).

In our deployment, the managers are local accounts and do not use SSO. Currently, the following manager accounts exist:

  • gh_manager (Gavin)
  • js_manager (Julian)
  • rtt_manager (Richard T)

These accounts don't allow modification of Ghostwriter config - the admin account is required for that.

Creating a new client

Use Clients->Add New Client in the left menu, after (obviously) checking we don't already have a client with the same name (not sure if it prevents addition of duplicate clients).

Set Client Name and Client Short Name appropriately. Set Client Codename to the first component of the schedule code (e.g. MRX for Marex).

There is nothing else that needs to be done, although adding business addresses and client points of contact (on the Points of Contact tab) is useful.

We're not currently using the "invites" functionality.

Creating a project

A project should most likely correspond to a single scheduling engagement.

Create a new one via Projects->Add New Project in the left menu, or via the Project history tab for a client.

Select the correct client, and set Project Codename to the schedule code (e.g. MRX001).

Set start date and end date appropriately (they need to be set) although I'm not aware that they make much difference to anything.

Set Project Type to Penetration Test. Again, I'm not aware that this value influences anything important.

Now you need to add the relevant users to the project via the Assignments tab (we're not using the Invites functionality at the moment, as noted above). For setting the dates of an assignment, the Copy button is useful as it will just copy the date from the enclosing project. Note that Add assignment at the bottom is to add another user to the project, and Submit is to save the changes.