Re: Supplemental Group Profiles

["R. Bruce Hoffman, Jr." <rbruceh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Graap, Ken <keg@exchange.gasco.com>
To: 'Midrange' <midrange-l@midrange.com>
Date: Thursday, July 13, 2000 7:32 PM
Subject: Supplemental Group Profiles


>We are working on reviewing our AS/400's current security model
>implementation.
>
>We have one system that supports both development and production
>environments.
>
>Some user profiles are members in as many as 8-10 different group profiles.
>
>The question has come up... What if any, risk is associated with using
>Supplemental Group Profiles in order to give a single user profile access
to
>multiple environments? Would it be better to have multiple user profiles,
>one designed to access each different environment?
>
>An environment in this case would be defined a PRODUCTION, DEVELOPMENT,
>STAGING, TRAINING etc.
>


I like the supplemental groups as an option for a few classes of user, but
when the number of "roles" becomes large, the supplemental groups get
cumbersome and the profile just can't hold that many.

In those instances, I believe that what you should use is the Authorization
Lists.  Not only are these relatively unlimited in number, they carry
multiple users to multiple objects, and are persistent.  Just be sure you
understand the save/restore ramifications for disaster recovery on a
different machine.

Of course, the issue of performance will be raised, but in this day and age,
better hardware is cheaper if it keeps the system administrator from
spending all of their time chasing security issues and building convoluted
group profile schemes.

===========================================================
R. Bruce Hoffman, Jr.
 -- IBM Certified AS/400 Professional System Administrator
 -- IBM Certified AS/400 Professional Network Administrator
 -- IBM Certified Specialist - AS/400 Administrator
 -- IBM Certified Specialist - RPG IV Developer

"Those who would give up essential Liberty,
  to purchase a little temporary Safety,
  deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     - The Papers of Ben Franklin



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