13 Group Management

The Group Administration functions allow an you to:

Create / Delete new Groups
Assign resources to a Group
Add or Remove users to Groups
Bulk import Groups
The WANdisco Groups contain a list of resources the group can access. A Group also allows for restriction based on the client's IP address and the CVS branch.
Groups are hierarchical with parent-children associations between sub-groups. Groups provide a convenient way of organizing multiple users into a related category for controlling access as well as searching for users.

13.1 How to create new Groups

The first step towards setting up security is to map organization or project structure to WANdisco Groups.

To add a new group, click on the Create Group option in the security menu and specify its name. The name can contain any character, including white-space, except the underscore character. The group name is the primary key into the group database, it can not be changed. The description field can contain any relevant text describing the group. The WANdisco Security Agent tracks the creation and modification time-stamp on the groups automatically.

With WANdisco Security Agent the Client IP Pattern allows you to restrict access based on the client's IP address. This field can be a regular expression, for example, to allow any user with an IP address that begins with 192.168 enter the value: 192.168.*

Note that the period character must be prefixed by a backslash. With regular expressions, the period character is used to represent a character that can have any value.

Multiple File / Dir Patterns can be entered for a Group. To add or remove patterns use the add allow, add deny and remove dir buttons below the text input. The magnifying glass icon to the right of the input allows for browsing the file system to select a file or directory.

The Branch Pattern field also allows for regular experssions. For example, to specify access to the HEAD and a branch named release001 enter the value: HEADrelease001

Note the pipe character in between the two values.

Once a group is created, you can start assigning users to it.

Please note that a system group Admin always exists in the WANdisco Security Agent. A user belonging to the Admin Group has all privileges on all resources.

13.1.1 Sub-Group Assignment

The group is assigned under the checked group as a sub-group. To de-assign, select the Root group. Note by selecting a group, this group is automatically assigned as its sub-group. A sub-group can have exactly one parent. A child Group inherits all of the resources and privileges from the parent Group.

13.2 How to delete a Group

From the List Groups page click the Delete link next to the Group name and confirm that you would like to delete this Group. When a group is deleted it is also removed from the all users who previously belonged to that group.

13.3 Add or Remove Users from a Group

In the Security tab under Group Administration you can use the Assign Users and Remove Users pages to mass assign users. First select a Group on the left. The list of users on the right will be updated to reflect valid additions. Hold down control to select multiple users on the right. As an example, if John is already in the Group Admin he will not be shown as a possible addition to that group.

If a user has been added to a parent group, they automatically belong to any sub-groups underneath it. So there is no need to add them to the sub-groups. The context-aware web UI will show users who are not in parent groups for example when adding them to a sub-group.

A bulk user import is available and described later in this document.

13.4 Group membership

To view a list of users who belong directly to a specific Group, go to Security, List Users and click the List Users link next to the Group name.