Admin Alert: Make User Profiles Go Cross-Partition with OpsNav

by Joe Hertvik

The iSeries Navigator (better known as "OpsNav") has a lot of nice hidden features that make life easier for administrators. One valuable feature is that you can use OpsNav for propagating OS/400 user profiles from one i5, iSeries, or AS/400 partition to another, while retaining the same profile information in each environment. Here's how you do it.

First, if you are going to use OpsNav to transfer user profiles (or other OS/400 objects, such as libraries) between different systems, you need to have a Management Central network set up that connects all your different AS/400, iSeries, and i5 machines. Management Central is available on OS/400-based boxes with OS/400 V4R5, although the later versions provide better functionality. Setting up a Management Central network isn't difficult, and you can find detailed instructions for setting one up in all supported environments at the iSeries Information Center. You'll also need to have a working OpsNav client that has access to your Management Central network.

After you have Management Central correctly set up, and you want to transfer a user profile from one partition to others, here's the drill:

Step One

Start OpsNav and open the Users and Groups and then the All Users nodes under the AS/400, iSeries, or i5 connection you want to transfer your user profile from. If you want to transfer multiple user profiles, hold down the Control or Shift buttons to select more than one profile.

Step Two

Once you've selected the users you want to transfer, right-click a highlighted user and select Send from the pop-up menu that appears. This will take you to the Send Users from System panel; the System is the name of the OS/400-based system you are transferring the profile from.

Step Three

The Send Users from System panel is simple to use. It allows you to select which endpoint systems or system groups to send your user profiles to. Simply highlight a system entry in the Available Systems and Groups box on that screen, and click the Add button to move that entry name to the selected systems and group section of the screen. By doing this, you build a list of target systems to move the profile to.

Step Four

After building your transfer list, you can also click the Options tab of the Send Users from System screen. The Options panel provides additional setting on what to do if the user already exists on the target system (the default is to update the user with the new content being sent). It also contains an Advanced button that gives you options for synchronizing the user profile's Unique Identifier (UID) and Local or Remote Mail System settings.

Step Five

Once you've provided all the transfer details, click the OK button until you exit the Send Users from System panel. OpsNav may provide a message that tells you a task has been started for this activity. In that message, it also provides the task number for your transfer.

Step Six

To view the transfer, open the Task Activity and Users and Groups nodes, under the Management Central Central Server tree in OpsNav. This displays your current user profile transfer task, as well as any other tasks that are pending or were previously executed. It also shows the status of your task, which will read "Starting," "Started," "Stopped," "Completed," or "Failed." You can refresh the status by pressing the F5 key.

Step Seven

If the status reads "Completed," the user profile was transferred without any problems. However, don't be alarmed if the status reads "Failed." That could mean that the user profile was transferred but OpsNav was unable to transfer some private authorities along with the user profile. For example, if the job description of the transferred user profile doesn't exist on the target system, OpsNav will still transfer the user profile to the new system, but mark the transfer as "Failed" in the process. In my testing, I found that it was rare to get a "Completed" transfer status. All of my user profiles were transferred successfully, but they weren't usable until I edited the user profile on my target system with the proper parameters.

Step Eight

Edit the user profile to fill in any parameters that it needs in order to run on the target system. In some instances, such as when you're transferring from a test partition to a live partition, the user profile will have everything it needs on the target system. But you may have to tweak the profile to make it work. Editing can be done in OpsNav by opening the new profile under the Users and Groups and All Users nodes of the target system. You can also edit the profile by using the Work with User Profiles (WRKUSRPRF) command inside a green-screen emulator. The most common items you'll need to change on a transferred profile are the groups it belongs to, the job description it uses, and the initial program or initial menu the system starts when the user signs on to the system.

Step Nine

After all your private authorities and user parameters are reconciled, the user should be able to use the new user profile to sign on to each target system with the same password he used on the system the profile was created on.

And that's the drill for using OpsNav to propagate user profiles from one system to several other systems. Even though you may have to make some manual modifications to the user profile, the biggest benefit is that OpsNav propagation also propagates the password of the user profile to the new systems, which is beneficial to both you and your users.