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Section 3 - 10 SENTRY User’s Guide
Fitzgerald & Long
UID - UNIX maintains a relationship between users and files by assigning ownership via the UID, the
user’s number. To maintain the translation of UIDs to user IDs (used by the file system), the
Administrator should take care when creating or changing this relationship.
GID Name - When a user login ID is created, UNIX allows the user to be assigned to a group. Here
again, the name of the group is not held in the passwd file, only the group’s number or GID. In this report
we translate so that the name appears instead of the number.
Supplementary Groups - This may be a multi-valued list of group names in which this user has
membership. These are groups “in addition to” the GID to which the user belongs.
Login Shell or Command - When a user logs in, UNIX will execute whatever “startup” command the
Administrator specified for that user. This startup command is commonly the pathname to one of the
various UNIX shells. In our example we are using /bin/sh, the Bourne shell.
Home Directory - When a user logs into your system, he will be “attached to” a “home” directory. This
field defines the directory to be used.
User Name - This is a text field used for documentation and display only. We recommend that user
names be entered LAST, FIRST in order to offer greater reporting functionality.
Department - This is another text field used for documentation and display only. We recommend that
you consider your reporting needs and use this field for whatever purpose seems of most benefit in your
environment.
Telephone - Here again is another text field used for documentation and display only. Telephone
numbers may be of importance to the System Administrator. However, if there are other types of data
which would be more useful to you, please feel encouraged to enter that data which makes the best use of
this field in your environment.
Note that the user “Name”, “Department”, and “Telephone” data is written into the “GCOS” field of the
UNIX passwd file. This data is displayed by the UNIX “finger” command.
This report was created by the reporting language in your database system. The paragraph which
generated this report is VOCLIB/SENTRY.USERS.REPORT. The data file used is SENTRY.USERS.
In addition to the data displayed here you may create a report which displays the last login date and time.
The name of the dictionary item is LAST.LOGIN. It is not included on this report because of its ever
changing values. Additionally, a subroutine call is executed to “look-up” the last date/time the user
logged in. Given a large number of users, the amount of time to “look up” this data could excessive.
If you need to modify the file dictionary records to produce custom reports, we recommend that you create
new records rather than modifying the provided records. This will reduce the impact of upgrades on your
work.