Chapter 4: User Accounts, Login, and Accounting

Overview

OpenVMS has the capability to:

• Create, modify, display, and delete user accounts.

• Manage the several global parameters governing login security policy.

• Monitor account usage and produce a wide variety of reports.

Before a user can log into an OpenVMS system, he or she must have an account. The most secure way to manage an OpenVMS system is to assign unique accounts to each user. Protected in this way, a user may be assured that his or her files are private and can be accessed only by permission. By default, all files created in an account are private; however, the user may choose to share files with other users, and that discussion is found in Chapter 8.

Accounts have other characteristics as well. These characteristics govern how system resources are allocated to the user when logged in. There are more than a dozen quota limits associated with each account. The quota values are measured by OpenVMS to enforce overall performance of the system. For instance, the number of memory-resident pages (OpenVMS is a demand paging system) is limited so that a single user cannot allocate all of physical memory to his or her executing image. As with security settings, the default quotas assigned at account creation are usually adequate, but the system manager (not the user) may change them. These characteristics are similar to, but much more extensive than, the ones that the UNIX limit and ulimit commands govern.

Creating an account and then assigning and supervising its quotas is a system manager task. The importance of this task is more completely described in this chapter.