User registries
Overview
Information about users and groups reside in a user registry.
With WebSphere Application Server, a user registry authenticates a user and retrieves information about users and groups to perform security-related functions, including authentication and authorization.
WAS supports Local OS, LDAP, and custom user registries.
Although WAS supports different types of user registries, only one user registry can be active. This active registry is shared by all of WAS server processes. If WAS processes in one node or cell need to communicate with other product processes in other nodes or cells using LTPA, all of the nodes and cells share the same user registry.
Custom User Registry
Implemented using UserRegistry, are is helpful in situations where the current user/group info exists in some other format (for example, a database or flat file) and cannot move to Local OS or LDAP.
For example, a custom user interface can glean user login information from a flat file containing user ids, groups, and roles, etc,... This would be an appropriate authentication scheme for a development or test environment. Distributed authentication can be enabled by copying the flat file to each server in a cluster.