User Name Standards

This document describes the standards for assigning user names and UID numbers in MtXia'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 MtXia's environment by LDAP. All user requests and assignments must be performed through the centralized user management system via the LDAP servers.

20060829: Policy Change requires the change management number, used to request the addition of a user, be recorded in the GECOS field when adding a user to a Unix system.

The format of the GECOS field shall exist with the following structure:

ChangeManagementNumber , Country Code , Full User Name , Additional Info
        15 char        ,    3 char    ,  Variable Len  ,  Variable Len

The detailed information for each component of the resource group name is described below:

Change Management
Number Country Code Full User Name Additional Info

CHMN01234567890 usa = United States ind = India pol = Poland Last Name, First Name Phone Number

Change Management Number	Country Code	Full User Name	Additional Info
CHMN01234567890	`usa = United States ind = India pol = Poland`	Last Name, First Name	Phone Number

A typical record may appear in the "/etc/passwd" file as follows:

french:!:635991:1:CHMN00002345678,usa,French,Dana,972.216.3179:/home/french:/usr/bin/ksh