User Guide

Welcome to the Knocknoc User Guide. This will cover basic operations including logging in, logging out and troubleshooting.

If you're looking for information on installing or administering Knocknoc, please check out the Admin Guide.

Logging Into Knocknoc

Knocknoc will be hosted at a site selected by your administrator, and hosted either on-premise or in the Knocknoc Cloud.

Please be careful to ensure the URL is correct and matches the site provided by your administrator. 

Knocknoc Login Dialog

You can simply login with your provided credentials, and Knocknoc will allow you to connect to the resources allocated to you.  If you have SSO configured in your Knocknoc instance, the green SSO button will appear, and you can click this to take you to your Identity Provider (IdP), like Jumpcloud, Okta or Microsoft Entra, and then login there (hopefully with MFA), and you will be returned back all logged in and ready to go.   Most users can simply login at the start of the day, and then open their other bookmarks or applications and everything will work until the end of their day.

2FA - TOTP

If your administrator has enabled it, you may be prompted to enrol a 2nd factor authenticator for your account. Knocknoc supports Time-based One Time Password (TOTP). If you have haven't setup TOTP yet, the first time you login, you will be prompted to enrol your TOTP device with a  QR code, or use the secret key. 

You can use your favourite TOTP application, like Duo, Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, or even you password manager to enrol at this step. Once you have added the QR code or secret key, enter the code your TOTP app generates in the Code box and click Verify. On each login you will then be prompted for a fresh code.

Knocknoc Logged In

As you can see on this page, the user Dwight Schrute is logged in, and a timer is counting down to when their session ends. On the right hand side you can see the Description and Status columns, with possible links to the sites your administrator has configured. Items with attached hyperlinks have the little External Link Icon . The Status column displays Granted, Revoked or Error, in the case Knocknoc can't contact the relevant application to allow your access. Please contact your admin if you see the Error status, as they will need to troubleshoot the issue.

After you have been granted access, you can then proceed to connect to these resources. From the above example, Dwight would now be able to:

• SSH to the AWS based EC2 machine
• Browse to the web interface of Icinga. 
• Use the phone handset on his desk to make and receive calls via FusionPBX

In normal operation, all items in the Status column should be Granted. Knocknoc checks to see if the granting of an ACL was successful, and ensures it can revoke the ACL once the user logs out, or the time expires.

The browser window does not need to remain open, and the ACL will be revoked from the server side when the time expires. 

Logging Out

Simply click the Logout button in the top right to logout. Note this will revoke all the Granted ACLs, removing access to those resources. You don't need to keep the window open to keep access to the resources, this is handled on the server side.

What if something goes wrong?

If something went wrong in the Granting of the ACL this access will remain blocked. You can see an example below:

In this case, Knocknoc attempted to grant access to FusionPBX, however it failed, alerting the user with the status Error. The Knocknoc Admin will need to be notified, requiring them to troubleshoot and rectify the back-end error to restore access.