Novell ZENWORKS LINUX MANAGEMENT 7.3 IR2 - ADMINISTRATION GUIDE 02-12-2010 Administration Manual page 389

A rule is made up of one or more filters that are used to determine whether a device complies
with the rule. The Rule Construction dialog box begins with one empty filter. A device must
match the entire filter list of a rule (as determined by the logical operators that are explained
below) for the rule to apply to the device.
A filter is a row of fields providing a condition that must be met by a device in order for the
bundle to be applied. For example, you can add a filter to specify that the device must have
exactly 512 MB of RAM in order to be accepted by the rule, and you can add another filter to
specify that the hard drive be at least 20 GB in size. There is no technical limit to the number of
filters that you can add in the rule, but there are practical limits, such as:
Designing a rule that is easy to understand
Devising the rule so that you do not accidentally create conflicting filters
Being able to view the dialog box as it grows in size because of the filters that you add
Filters can be added individually or in sets. Each set contains logical operators within the set.
The logical operator OR is displayed by default for the filters within a set in the Combine filters
using field, which you can change, and AND is displayed in the Filter sets will be combined
using field, which is display-only. In other words, the logical operator that is used within a set
must be opposite the operator that is used between the sets.
You can think of filters and filter sets using algebraic notation parentheticals, where filters are
contained within parentheses, and sets are separated into a series of parenthetical groups.
Logical operators (AND and OR) separate the filters within a the parentheses, and the operators
are used to separate the parentheticals.
For example, "(u AND v AND w) OR (x AND y AND z)" means "match either uvw or xyz." In
the Rule Construction dialog box, this looks like:
u AND v AND w OR x AND y AND z
Setting Up Preboot Services 389