System Administration Guide: Naming and Directory Services (NIS+)

Specifying NIS+ Access Rights in Commands

This section assume an NIS+ environment running at security level 2 (the default level).

This section describes how to specify access rights, as well as owner, group owner, and object, when using any of the commands described in this chapter.

NIS+ Syntax for Access Rights

This subsection describes the access rights syntax used with the various NIS+ commands that deal with authorization and access rights.

NIS+ Class, Operator, and Rights Syntax

Access rights, whether specified in an environment variable or a command, are identified with three types of arguments: class, operator, and right.

Class. Class refers to the type of NIS+ principal (authorization class) to which the rights will apply.

Class	Description
`n`	Nobody: all unauthenticated requests
`o`	The owner of the object or table entry
`g`	The group owner of the object or table entry
`w`	World: all authenticated principals
`a`	All: shorthand for owner, group, and world (this is the default)

Operator. The operator indicates the kind of operation that will be performed with the rights.

Operator	Description
`+`	Adds the access rights specified by right
`-`	Revokes the access rights specified by right
`=`	Explicitly changes the access rights specified by right; in other words, revokes all existing rights and replaces them with the new access rights.

Rights. The rights are the access rights themselves. The accepted values for each are listed below.

Right	Description
`r`	Reads the object definition or table entry
`m`	Modifies the object definition or table entry
`c`	Creates a table entry or column
`d`	Destroys a table entry or column

You can combine operations on a single command line by separating each operation from the next with a comma (,).

Table 15–7 NIS+ Class, Operator, and Rights Syntax – Examples


Operations	Syntax
Add read access rights to the owner class	`o+r`
Change owner. group, and world classes' access rights to modify only from whatever they were before	`a=m`
Add read and modify rights to the world and nobody classes	`wn+m`
Remove all four rights from the group, world, and nobody classes	`gwn-rmcd`
Add create and destroy rights to the owner class and add read and modify rights to the world and nobody classes	`o+cd,wn+rm`

NIS+ Syntax for Owner and Group

Owner. To specify an owner, use an NIS+ principal name.
Group. To specify an NIS+ group, use an NIS+ group name with the domain name appended.

Remember that principal names are fully qualified (principalname.domainname).

For owner

principalname

For group

groupname.domainname

NIS+ Syntax for Objects and Table Entries

Objects and table entries use different syntaxes.

Objects use simple object names.
Table entries use indexed names.

For objects

objectname

For table entries

columnname=value],tablename

Note –

In this case, the brackets are part of the syntax.

Indexed names can specify more than one column-value pair. If so, the operation applies only to the entries that match all the column-value pairs. The more column-value pairs you provide, the more stringent the search, as in the following.

Table 15–8 NIS+ Object and Table Entry – Examples


Type	Example
Object	`hosts.org_dir.sales.doc.com.`
Table entry	`[uid=33555],passwd.org_dir.Eng.doc.com.'
Two-value table entry	`[name=sales,gid=2],group.org_dir.doc.com.'

Columns use a special version of indexed names. Because you can only work on columns with the nistbladm command, see Using the nistbladm Command With NIS+ Tables for more information.