Choosing the Administration Domain

The administration domain allows you to logically group Sun ONE servers together so that you can more easily distribute server administrative tasks. A common scenario is for two divisions in a company to each want control of their individual Sun ONE servers. However, you may still want some centralized control of all the servers in your enterprise. Administration domains allow you to meet these conflicting goals.

Administration domains have the following qualities.

• All servers share the same configuration directory, regardless of the domain to which they belong

• Servers in two different domains may use two different user directories for authentication and user management

• The configuration directory administrator has complete access to all installed Sun ONE servers, regardless of the domain to which they belong

• Each administration domain can be configured with an administration domain owner. This owner has complete access to all the servers in the domain but does not have access to the servers in any other administration domain

• The administration domain owner can grant individual users administrative access on a server by server basis within the domain

For many configurations, you can have just one administration domain. In this case, choose a name that is representative of your organization. For other configurations, you may want different domains because of the demands at your site. In the latter case, try to name your administration domains after the organizations that will control the servers in that domain.

For example, if you are an ISP and you have three customers for whom you are installing and managing Sun ONE servers, create three administration domains each named after a different customer.