Administration

Principals

Principals

A Principal is a string that names a specific entity to which a set of credentials may be assigned. Principals are users and network services that are included in your security network.

The general syntax of a principal is:

identifier/instance@REALM

A principal name consists of three parts,

identifier

is the name of either the network service or a user.

 

This is a required parameter and has to be specified.

/instance

is a group used to further identify the name. The

 

instance can identify the duties, organization or any

 

other information about the principal.

 

In case of a user, the instance is often used to describe

 

the intended use of the corresponding credentials.

 

In case of a host, the instance, is the fully qualified

 

domain name. Multiple instances of upto 255, are

 

allowed. Each additional instance is preceded by a /.

 

The rlogind, ftpd, rshd, rcpd, and telnetd use the

 

instance to indicate the name of the system where the

 

network service resides.

 

An instance may also imply special privileges. For

 

example, a security administrator could have a

 

principal account with an admin instance to use when

 

performing administration tasks.

 

This is an optional parameter that need not be

 

specified

Realm

identifies the realm in which the principal resides. By

 

convention, realm names are generally are the fully

 

qualified domain name of the primary server.

 

This a required parameter and has to be specified.

When creating principal names, note that a principal name:

is case sensitive

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