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There are several tasks that should be performed prior to installing PMDF for the first time. These tasks are outlined in the sections below.
1.4.1 Choosing a Server Account for PMDF
You should decide on a username for an account PMDF can use for its
PhoneNet and DECnet activities, and for channel and system mailbox
filtering. This account is used by such channels as a non-privileged
context for running server objects. And the PMDF manager will need to
authenticate with the PMDF account's password when modifying channel or
system mailbox filters. The recommended username is "PMDF".
Do not create or modify this account yourself; it will be set
up for you during the installation process.
The PMDF server account should be given a unique UIC of its own that it shares with no other account. Do not use the system UIC [1,4] or any of the implicitly privileged UICs (those UICs with a group number less than or equal to the SYSGEN parameter MAXSYSGROUP which typically has the decimal value 8, corresponding to the octal UIC group of [10,*]) for PMDF.
The PMDF server account will be non-privileged, with restricted access. If you have a PMDF account left over from a previous installation of PMDF you can continue to use the old account.
1.4.2 Choosing a User Account for PMDF
You must decide on a non-privileged account that PMDF can use when
performing actions in response to user-specified data. Such actions
include message delivery to files (e.g., bulletin board
delivery), and the optional sequence numbers in mailing lists.
This account, referred to as the PMDF user account, should be given a unique group UIC number of its own that it shares with no other accounts. Do not use the system UIC [1,4] or any of the implicitly privileged UICs (those UICs with a group number less than or equal to the SYSGEN parameter MAXSYSGROUP which typically has the decimal value 8, corresponding to the octal UIC group of [10,*]) for the PMDF user account. The recommended username is "PMDF_USER". Do not create or modify this account yourself; it will be set up for you during the installation process.
The PMDF user account will be non-privileged, with all access disabled. If you have a PMDF user account left over from a previous installation of PMDF you can continue to use the old account.
Before installation, there should be no PMDF or PMDF_USER SYSUAF entries, no [PMDF] or [PMDF_USER] rights identifiers, and no SYSUAF entries or rights identifiers assigned to any of the UICs in the two separate UIC groups you will be using for PMDF and PMDF_USER. |
1.4.3 Selecting a Service Queue
PMDF submits jobs to handle message delivery and uses periodic jobs
(jobs which reschedule themselves for execution each time they run) to
handle retries and deferred delivery. An OpenVMS queue must be
specified for these jobs to run in. PMDF expects to use a queue named
MAIL$BATCH. This queue must be either a batch queue or a queue handled
by the PMDF Process Symbiont.
The installation procedure will prompt for the name of a queue to use as the default PMDF service queue. If you do not provide the name MAIL$BATCH, the installation procedure will create a logical name MAIL$BATCH pointing to the queue name you did provide.
A dedicated queue for PMDF which executes at interactive priority (priority 4) with a small job limit (2 to 4) is recommended. Delivery of messages can be unacceptably slow if a low priority or heavily utilized queue is used. Note that PMDF channels can be configured to use queues other than the default queue. This is necessary when you have different networking products on different members of an OpenVMS cluster and want PMDF to serve them. PMDF channel programs must run on OpenVMS cluster members that support the channel's network interface.
You can improve PMDF message throughput by directing different channels to queues on different OpenVMS cluster members or by defining your PMDF default queue or channel queues as generic queues that feed multiple execution queues on different systems in an OpenVMS cluster. Note that there's no need to establish such a setup now; you can always grow to such a scheme later.
The jobs which are entered in this queue run under the SYSTEM account, so the queue can be protected against normal user submissions if desired.
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