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Section 7.3
Users and Groups.
PI has two default users when you first
create the system. They are
PIAdmin who is kind of the super user, and
PIDemo who is a guest account.
Now we also have two groups of users who are
created. One is called PIAdmin. And
yes, I am very sorry about that. You may notice
that PIAdmin, the name of the user, is
exactly the same name as the name of the group to which PIAdmin belongs.
In fact, it causes endless amounts
of confusion and I am very sorry that we made that choice.
Anyway, we should have called it PIAdministrator
or something like that. It's not your imagination if you
think this is kind of hard to follow along.
So we do have two groups, one of which is
called PIAdmin. And
then the second group by default is called PIUser.
There is nothing special in particular about the PIUser
group. It's just a group that we created
just to demonstrate to begin with when you first installed
the system how groups can exist on the PI Server.
You can create your own groups and
then make certain
users, give certain users membership to those groups.
Now you will notice that a user can be a
member of many different groups.
And we create these using a
plug-in to SMT that we are going to look at right now.
So the best way I can describe
security in PI using
users and groups is imaging
you have got... Some people at your physical location have more keys than other people-- they can get into more rooms.
That's kind of what it means to have
membership in certain groups. When you are a member
of lots of groups, you probably have access to more
objects and more things within PI. So here is the
list of users. This is the user
called PIAdmin and as you can see he belongs to a group called PIAdmin.
If you notice that is plural, groups.
That's because the user PIAdmin can belong to many groups.
In addition, there is PIDemo. PIDemo
is the test user, the guest account.
And he is a member of the PIUser group though
it does not give him any particular privileges.
Here is the list of the groups and as you can
see, there are two groups-- PIAdmin and PIUser. So
if I were to create a brand new user,
creating that user simply means going in
here and choosing a new user. Defining that
user. This is going to be Ed, and I am giving him a description
and a password if I wanted, or I could leave his password blank.
And that creates the user. And once I have created that
user, there are ways of adding
him to groups. I can give him memberships in
groups or I can go into the groups
section and I can add users this way.
So I can go and find Ed and add him that way.
So as you can see it's pretty straightforward. The one thing about groups that
I should mention is this does not in any way
integrate, at this time, with the
Active Directory groups
or the Windows groups that you may be familiar
with. So it is not integrated with Active Directory. Obviously
that is the direction that we are heading, but right now,
it does not support reaching out
and incorporating Active Directory groups.
Also we do not support incorporating groups within groups.
And we will talk more about that when we look at security.