Does this mean that cgminer permissions cannot be edited? Otherwise you can't call privileged commands to port 4028, only stuck with summary, stats, etc. and everything else has to be done through the http api.
Privileged operations can only be done through the http API.
Yes, the API does not allow Awesome Miner support, which requires SSH access.
Awesome Miner is the unified interface that I use to manage all of my miners. It gives me essentially a dashboard from which I can see the status of all miners on one screen, perform maintenance tasks on them, and create tigger-action automatically executing rules that will allow the miners to respond to a number of different scenarios (low hashrate auto-reboot, power off during certain hours and back on automatically later, power off if temps get too high for a defined period, pool switching, etc.)
Why can't Awesome Miner just use the http API?