When the agent and policy server are on different sides of a firewall, Privilege Manager for Unix needs a number of ports to be kept open. By default, Privilege Manager for Unix can use ports in the 600 to 31024 range, but when using a firewall, you may want to limit the ports that can be used.
You can restrict Privilege Manager for Unix to using a range of ports in the reserved ports range (600 to 1023) and the non-reserved ports range (1024 to 65535). We recommend that a minimum of six ports are assigned to Privilege Manager for Unix in the reserved ports range and twice that number of ports are assigned in the non-reserved ports range.
Use the setreserveportrange and setnonreserveportrange settings in the /etc/opt/quest/qpm4u/pm.settings file to open the ports in the required ranges. See PM settings variables for details.
If configuring Privilege Manager for Unix to use NAT (Network Address Translation), you may need to configure the pmtunneld component. See Configuring firewalls for more information about using Privilege Manager for Unix with NAT and restricting port numbers.
Ensure that each host on your network knows the names and IP addresses of all other hosts. This information is stored either in the /etc/hosts file on each machine, or in NIS maps or DNS files on a server. Whichever you use, ensure all host names and IP addresses are up-to-date and available.
Privilege Manager for Unix components must be able to use forward and reverse lookup of the host names and IP addresses of other components.
It is important for you to reserve the following special user and group names for Privilege Manager for Unix usage:
- Users: pmpolicy
- Groups: pmpolicy, pmlog
The pmpolicy user is created on a primary or secondary server. It is a non-privileged service account (that is, it does not require root-level permissions) that is used to synchronize the security policy on policy servers.
The pmlog and pmpolicy groups are used to control access to log files and the security policy, respectively.
Since you can use Privilege Manager for Unix to run applications on remote machines, ensure that the applications and the files that they access are available from those machines. Typically, you can use a product such as NFS (supplied with most UNIX operating systems) to make users’ home directories and other files available in a consistent location across all computers.