Group Name Standards

This document describes the standards for assigning group names and GID numbers in MtXia's AIX environment. A single standard has been developed for use in standalone, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery environments. This group naming standard provides the mechanism to assign enterprise wide unique group names to all AIX groups'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.

Groups are normally divided into two major categories on a Unix system, administration and normal user groups. Applications such as databases, SAP, MQSeries, etc may require an administration group. With each new group created on a Unix system a group ID number is assigned to that group, this group ID number is referred to as the GID number and is normally unique to that group on that one Unix system. When building highly available and/or recoverable systems, the group name and GID number must be enterprise wide unique values. Therefore a centralized group management system must be implemented to manage groups and GID numbers to ensure that no two groups have the same group name or UID number.

This centralized group management function is performed in MtXia's environment by LDAP. All group requests and assignments must be performed through the centralized group management system via the LDAP servers.