Profile characteristics

On iSeries™, a user profile can be used as either a user or a group profile. That means someone can sign on to iSeries with a group ID and do work on the system as a user. However, in NetWare, only user objects can be used to log in and run applications. Groups are separate object types that are used only to combine and then manage individual user objects as one entity. For example, you can specify file access rights on a group object basis, and the users belonging to those groups inherit those file rights.

You can define an iSeries profile as a user object in one NDS tree and as a group object in a different NDS tree. However, you cannot define an iSeries profile as both a group and a user in the same NDS tree.

You can define iSeries group profiles as user objects on NetWare. However, group members in these profiles are not automatically enrolled on NetWare.

Defining iSeries user profiles as group objects on NetWare has these advantages:

• Using groups reduces the number of profiles that you must individually enroll in your network. When you enroll an iSeries group profile and its members to a NetWare server, the user profiles that belong to the group enroll automatically.
• Using groups also reduces the number of profiles for which you need to define NetWare security. You can set rights and attributes for a group object, and the group members inherit those rights and attributes.
• You can also use groups to better manage access to your network resources. For example, if you install financial applications and data on a NetWare server, you can grant access for that server to only the FINANCE group.

When you enroll iSeries group and user profiles on NetWare servers, iSeries sends only the information in the group and user profiles that applies to NetWare. The profile information that you specify for those iSeries attributes overwrites the corresponding NetWare attributes. Thus any changes that NetWare users make to these attributes are overwritten when you propagate the iSeries profile changes.

You can add additional NetWare group and user attributes, such as user properties for a telephone number, fax number, and last name, from the NetWare NWADMIN utility.