Preventing Accidental User Creation

PROBLEM

How do I prevent new users from being created accidentally?

SOLUTION

As of Rel 98.2, Perforce groups can be used to control user access. Normally, Perforce creates a new user in its database whenever a command is issued by a username it has not seen before. A Perforce superuser can disable the creation of new users by assigning all authorized users to a group, and permitting access to the authorized group only.

You can create a group with:

p4 group groupname

Use p4 protect to edit the protections table and deny access to users not in the authorized group. For example, the default protections which look like:

write user * * //...

should be changed to:

write group groupname * //...

Please note that any lines in the protections table that specify "user *" will allow the automatic creation of a user. This applies to exclusionary mappings as well. All protections must be by group (such as "group *" or "group groupname") or by specifying a particular user (eg. "user joe") if you want to avoid automatic user creation.

For more information on protections, review the chapter on "Protections" in the Perforce System Administrator's Guide.