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Are You Ready for Intelligent Routing?

Imagine this scenario: You're at an antique auction sale. You come across several boxes of miscellaneous items and riffle through them. In one box, you find an antique brass picture frame that you need for an old family portrait. The box comes up for bid, and you bid on it and win. When you get the box home, you discover some other useful household items and an antique pocket watch that you overlooked when you initially looked through the box.

Well, certain OS/400* V5R2 functions are like that pocket watch, and V5R2 is like the box. In the January iSeries announcement letter, you may have overlooked some enhancements being made in V5R2 this year. Tucked away in the software section, for example, was the announcement for several new directory functions coming to iSeries that have recently become available for use. These new functions are provided in Version 4.1 of the IBM Directory Server. (For installation information, see, "Installing the Functions.") The enhancements focus on improving usability of managing groups and search results.

Administrators who are using groups will be interested in leveraging these new features. The group enhancements offer flexibility in defining group membership and reduce the administration overhead of managing groups. You can configure nested groups by defining a group as a member of another group. Dynamic group membership can also be configured using a search expression.

If you're accustomed to conducting searches that return many directory entries or data, you've probably noticed that the search results aren't returned in any particular order. This can be especially noticeable when wading through returned data interactively. Searching large amounts of data has been simplified now that the search results can be returned one page at a time and in sorted order.

Another new feature includes the support for commonly used special characters within distinguished names (DNs). You may also notice improved performance. The server was enhanced to allow multiple clients to search and update their directory entries simultaneously.

Managing Groups
Groups can be used in the lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) server when defining access control to parts of the directory and by applications using the LDAP server for defining group membership. A couple of limitations exist with regular groups. First, having a large group creates large entries in the directory. Second, when an entry is added or changed, the group entries may have to be updated to reflect the change. LDAP group functionality has been enhanced with this PTF by the implementation of nested and dynamic groups.

 

 

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