Administration system

The administration system is a central system that is used to manage many of the properties used by IBM® i Access for Windows clients.

A system administrator must use Application Administration to configure a system before it can act as an administration system. Administration system settings are defined on the IBM i Access for Windows Properties > Administration System page. When you right-click a system and select Application Administration, you can see the additional choices, Local Settings and Central Settings, if that system is already defined as an administration system. Typically, a network has only one system acting as an administration system. For an example network, see Figure 1. This administration system is used by IBM i Access for Windows clients as the source of their Central Settings for Application Administration. Although a network can have multiple systems defined as an administration system, the IBM i Access for Windows clients only use a single administration system for their central settings.

Figure 1. When a Client PC connects to a system, the Local Settings come from the system that you connect to. When you connect to an administration system, the Central Settings are sent to your Client PC from the administration system.

Network with an administration system, a System i system, and client PC.

On the administration system, you may select the Local Settings. These settings allow or deny access to administrable functions. The administration system's Local Settings only apply to the administration system.

A system administrator can work with the access settings of users and groups using Application Administration on a local system, but the administration system provides additional ways to manage users and groups. An administrator can select Central Settings on an administration system to work with advanced settings. These advanced settings control which environments are available to specific users and groups. A system administrator can also control password, connection, service, language settings, and whether to automatically determine if new plug-ins are available for installation.

Note: You must have security administrator (*SECADM) and all object (*ALLOBJ) system privileges to work with advanced settings on an administration system. This differs from other settings in Application Administration, which only require security administrator (*SECADM) system privilege to make changes.