Dell PowerConnect 8100 CLI Reference Guide - Page 271

5 Administrative Profiles Commands Overview The administrative profiles capability provides the network administrator control over which commands a user is allowed to execute. The administrator is able to group commands into a "profile" and assign a profile to a user upon authentication. This provides more granularity than simply allowing readonly and read-write users. It may be, for example, that a particular user is only allowed to manage the Captive Portal feature but not allowed to manage any other of the switch features. This capability is similar to the industry standard "User Roles" feature. The main difference is that the Administrative Profile is obtained via authentication rather than via authorization. This was necessary because Dell PowerConnect does not support AAA authorization of users. Functionally, the Administrative Profiles feature allows the network administrator to define a list of rules which control the commands which may be executed by a user. These rules are collected in a "profile." A rule defines a set of commands to which a user is permitted or denied access. Alternatively, a rule may define a CLI command mode to which the user is permitted or denied access. The rule numbers determine the order in which the rules are applied: Rules are applied in descending numerical order until there is a match. Rules may use regular expressions for command matching. All profiles have an implicit "deny all" rule such that any command which does not match any rules in the profile is considered to have been denied by that profile. It is possible to assign a user more than one profile. If there are conflicting rules in profiles, the "permit" rule always takes precedence over the "deny" rule, i.e., if any profile assigned to a user permits a command, then the user is permitted access to that command. A user may be assigned up to 16 profiles. A number of profiles are provided by default. These profiles may not be altered by the switch administrator. Administrative Profiles Commands 271