A supervisor is an administrator of the LAN. The supervisor has all the powers and rights on the LAN, and manages the day-to-day working of the LAN. The responsibilities of a supervisor are listed hereunder.
- When new employees join the organization, the supervisors initiate them as LAN users. They assign the login ids and passwords for the new users and decide what the new users' rights are going to be.
- For existing users, they can add or delete rights.
- They decide the amount of disk space on the server that each user can have.
- When user requests for additional rights to use a resource like a modem, the supervisor does the needful.
The supervisor has the right to access the user-area of any user.
Many LAN vendors define their own levels and groups for the LANs that they sell. That is to say, Novell might define levels for NetWare that are different from the ones that other vendors would define for their brands of LAN. What have been described are levels that are likely to be found across all LANs.
Novell NetWare defines one more level apart from the ones that we have described. They are called managers. They function as supervisors over a small group but do not have supervisory equivalence. Managers are of two types:
Work Group Managers
Work group manager is at a level below the supervisor. They can also be called assistant supervisors. Like all other LAN users, the supervisor creates them. They can create users and assign them to a particular group. They can restrict users' access to workstations and restrict concurrent logins. They can also change a user's password.
User Account Managers
A user account manager has the power to help the supervisor to manage a small group of LAN users and directories. User account managers have all the powers of a work group manager in their group, except that they cannot create users.