Administration

Running BananaScribe as a shared instance for a production team: setup, accounts, sessions, and operational notes. If you're running the single-user desktop app, none of this applies — skip to User Guide.

01When to use shared mode

Shared mode is for a production that wants one machine (typically the one with the strongest GPU) doing transcription work for several people, each reviewing or queuing their own jobs from their own workstation, rather than each person running a separate copy locally.

02Setting up the shared instance

1. Install on the host machine

   Follow Installation on the machine that will serve the rest of the team — ideally the one with the GPU.

2. First login

   On first run with no accounts yet, a default admin/admin account is seeded so the app is usable immediately — see Security — known tradeoffs. An operator can instead supply a custom initial admin username/password at install time so the default never exists even momentarily.

3. Change the default password immediately

   From the Admin > Manage Users... menu (visible only to admin accounts), reset the default account's password before anyone else connects.

4. Create an account per person

   Add one account per team member rather than sharing a login — this is what makes the single-active-session-per-account and per-user audit trail meaningful. See Managing accounts.

5. Share the address

   Team members on the same local network connect to the host machine's address and port from their own browser or desktop client. See Network placement for what this does and doesn't assume about the network.

03Managing accounts

Admin > Manage Users... lists every account and lets an administrator:

There's no self-service sign-up — every account is explicitly created by an administrator. The system won't let the last remaining admin account be demoted or removed, so a shared instance can never be left with zero administrators able to manage it.

04How sessions behave

• One active session per account — signing in on a new device ends the session on whichever device was previously signed in.
• Sessions idle out automatically (default: 30 minutes of inactivity) rather than staying valid indefinitely.
• Resetting a password immediately invalidates that account's existing session(s).
• Session state survives a service restart, so a routine restart of the host machine doesn't force everyone to re-login.

05Capacity & queue behavior with multiple users

Every user's jobs land in the same processing queue on the host machine — GPU transcription is strictly sequential on a given GPU by design (see How It Works — what's actually parallel), so jobs from different users are processed in queue order, not simultaneously. Cards can be reordered on the Dashboard (drag to reorder, top runs first) by anyone using the instance, which is worth setting a team norm around if several people are queuing work at once.

06Network placement

Shared mode is designed to be reached from other machines on a production's own local network — it is not designed to be placed on the open internet. See Security — known tradeoffs for the specific reasons (no TLS by default on the local web interface, a documented first-run default login). If a deployment's network isn't fully trusted, putting the instance behind a VPN or adding TLS are the recommended hardening steps rather than exposing it directly.