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Universal Resource Access
One of the challenges facing any network administrator is the task of presenting the user
with a means to access the resources available to him. For example, a user may be
assigned a home directory on the network, but unless a login script is run to map a drive
to that disk space, the user may have a difficult time locating and using the space.
File System Factory™ allocates and manages personal disk storage for users on the
network and populates the
Home Directory
attribute of the user object, which is accessed
by login scripts and other mechanisms. However, File System Factory™ also creates and
manages group storage on the network and users need to have a way to access that
storage. Typically a network administrator may define a drive mapping in a login script to
the group disk storage. However, a given user may be a member of many groups. There
may not be enough drive letters to map a drive for each group. Lastly, with the
automation and management provided by File System Factory™, the ability to provide
disk storage to all groups is now a real possibility.
File System Factory™ contains a workstation utility named Universal Resource Access,
or URAccess™, to provide a solution to this problem. When group disk storage is
allocated, a new attribute of the group object named
cccFSFactoryHomedir
is populated
with a path pointer to the storage, just as the
Home Directory
attribute of the user object
is populated with a path pointer to personal storage.
URAccess™ is located in the \FACTORY\URACCESS directory on the Engine server.
URAccess is a Windows utility that is supported on Client32-based Windows
workstations. Ash shown in the figure below, the utility is designed to reside in the
Windows System tray.
By invoking this utility during Windows Start-Up, the user will always have the ability to
access all personal and group storage without drive letters or login scripts. Right-clicking
on the icon will provide the user with a description-based menu of storage selections.
Clicking one of these menu items will invoke Windows Explorer with a pointer to that
storage.
URAccess works in concert with File System Factory™, as well as IUAdmin™, another
product from Condrey Consulting Corporation. Among it’s many capabilities,
IUAdmin™ allows administrators to associate many types of resources with any object in
the tree. These resources may be specific files or directories on the network or they may
be any URL accessing any page or application on the Intranet or Internet. These resource
links are all stored with the associated object in eDirectory. Then, anyone with security
equivalence or inherited rights to the associated object will see those resources in their
resource list through URAccess™.
The following diagram shows a typical user’s view of a system running both File System
Factory™ and IUAdmin™.
Novell File System Factory™ Administrator’s Guide
© 2002-2005 Condrey Consulting Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
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