Directory Server Roles

Roles are similar to groups but work in the opposite way — where a group entry lists the DN of the member entries, the DN of a role entry is listed on each member entry. The role mechanism makes it is easy to retrieve a list of roles that are assigned to an entry.

Each role has members, or entries that possess the role. The role mechanism is managed by the nsRoleDN attribute and the nsRole attribute. The nsRoleDN attribute is used to add an entry to a role. The nsRole attribute is a read-only attribute, maintained by the directory server, that lists the roles to which an entry belongs. The nsRole attribute can be read or searched by clients to enumerate all roles to which an entry belongs. If you do not want to expose role membership, define access controls to read-protect the nsRole attribute.

By default, the scope of a role is limited to the subtree where it is defined. The scope of a role can be extended to other subtrees on the same server instance.

Managed Roles

Managed roles are functionally very similar to static groups. Managed roles explicitly assign a role to each member entry by adding the nsRoleDN attribute to the entry. The value of this attribute is the DN of the role definition entry.

The role definition entry only defines the scope of the role in the directory. Members of the role are entries that lie within the scope of the role definition, and that identify the role definition entry with their nsRoleDN attributes.

Filtered Roles

Filtered roles are equivalent to dynamic groups. Entries are assigned a role if they match a specified search filter. The value of the search filter is defined by the nsRoleFilter attribute. When the server returns an entry in the scope of a filtered role, that entry contains the generated nsRole attribute that identifies the role.

Nested Roles

Nested roles are equivalent to nested groups. Nested roles enable you to create roles that contain other roles and to extend the scope of existing roles. A nested role can itself contain another nested role. Up to 30 levels of nesting are supported

A nested role lists the definition entries of other roles and combines all the members of their roles. If an entry is a member of a role that is listed in a nested role, then the entry is also a member of the nested role.

Limitations on Using Roles

When you use roles to support your directory service, be aware of the following limitations.

Roles and chaining

If your directory tree is distributed over several servers by using the chaining feature, entries that define roles must be located on the same server as the entries that possess those roles. If one server, A, receives entries from another server, B, through chaining, those entries will contain the roles defined on B, but will not be assigned any of the roles defined on A.

Filtered Roles cannot use CoS generated attributes

The filter string of a filtered role cannot be based on the values of a CoS virtual attribute. However, the specifier attribute in a CoS definition may reference the nsRole attribute generated by a role definition. For information about CoS, see Chapter 9, Directory Server Class of Service.

Extending the scope of roles

You can extend the scope of roles to different subtrees but they must be on the same server instance. You cannot extend the scope of roles to other servers.

Searches on the nsRole attribute

The nsRole attribute can be used in any search filter with any of the comparison operators. When you search on nsRole attribute, consider the following points:

• Searches on the nsRole attribute can take a long time because all roles must be evaluated before the entries can be filtered.

• Directory Server is optimized for equality searches on membership in managed roles. For example, this search will be nearly as fast as a search on real attributes.

  (&(nsRole=cn=managersRole,ou=People,dc=example,dc=com)
   (objectclass=person)

• The nsRoleDN attribute is indexed by default in all suffixes. Optimizations for searching the membership of managed roles are lost if indexing is disabled for the nsRoleDN attribute.

• Searches for entries that contain a filtered role involve an internal search with the role filter. This internal operation will be fastest if all attributes that appear in the role filter are indexed in all suffixes in the scope of the role.