This document describes the standards for assigning user names and UID numbers in Mt Xia's AIX environment. A single standard has been developed for use in standalone, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery environments. This user naming standard provides the mechanism to assign enterprise wide unique user names to all AIX users's and will eliminate naming conflicts in the event of a manual or automated failover, or if multiple instances of an application are running on a single server.
Users are normally divided into two major categories on a Unix system, administrators and normal users. Applications such as databases, SAP, MQSeries, etc normally require an administration user name and possibly a group name. With each new user created on a Unix system a user ID number is assigned to that user, this user ID number is referred to as the UID number and is normally unique to that user on that one Unix system. When building highly available and/or recoverable systems, the user name and UID number must be enterprise wide unique values. Therefore a centralized user management system must be implemented to manage users and UID numbers to ensure that no two users have the same user name or UID number.
This centralized user management function is performed in Mt Xia's environment by LDAP. All user requests and assignments must be performed through the centralized user management system via the LDAP servers.