LAN Community

A LAN is an organization within an organization. Just as any organization needs hierarchies and clear-cut roles and responsibilities, a LAN too needs hierarchies and groups. These hierarchies and groups help in the smooth functioning of the LAN.

All LANs, including Novell NetWare, form their own hierarchies and groups in an office, independent of the organizational structure.

A LAN contains data and software that is not meant to be used by everyone. Just imagine a LAN as a huge filing cabinet where every user has been assigned a different drawer to store his or her files. How would Tom feel if he discovers that John has got hold of the keys to his drawer and has been going through his files? Or if John's supervisor finds that John has been secretly going through the company's classified financial reports.

To implement proper security measures to manage resources, a LAN needs hierarchies and groups.

A LAN consists of users. The basic idea of having a LAN is the dissemination of information across all levels of an organization such that it can bring these levels closer and promote efficiency. Let us see how users in a LAN are organized (refer Figure).

Representation of Users in a LAN

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The Regular User

A Regular User is the person who works on the software, manages files and does not need to know the working of the network.

Each user is assigned a given area on the LAN server. This area, called the user area, could be a directory or a subdirectory, or a group of subdirectories under which the user can manage files. The user can ensure that no other user can access this area without permission. In turn, this user too cannot access other users' areas unless given permission.

Thus, a regular user of a LAN has a personalized set of rights and restrictions.

However, there are hierarchies within users themselves. In an organization, for example, a manager would be given more rights than a junior executive.

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User Group

A user group is created when a number of users have to be assigned the same set of rights and restrictions. A new LAN user can be put into one of these groups, which would automatically define the user's rights. A user can belong to more than one group. This entitles the user to the rights of the groups to which the user belongs. By default, every user, when created in NetWare, becomes a member of at least one group called EVERYONE.

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The Operator

An operator is a regular user who may be taking care of some additional operational issues of the LAN, and therefore has special privileges. For example, a user might be given special charge of making sure that the printer operates smoothly on the LAN. Therefore, special rights would be given to help the operator carry out this responsibility.

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The Supervisor

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.