[NTLUG:Discuss] More Hillcrest Questions/Netware

[Doug Shaw]

Kathleen Weaver wrote:

> I have a Novell server in my Computer Programming lab.  Is there a way to
> parallel Novell accounts with the Linux accounts?  Especially Samba?  I'd
> like to have my students save their work on the Linux server and use the
> Novell server for email, since Pegasus is already set up there.  There
> really isn't room enough for both on the Novell server.

Since you bring up Samba, I should point out that there is no relation
whatsoever between Netware and Samba, save that they are both
network-related.  Samba is a way of interfacing with "Windows networks" - be
they 95's peer-to-peer or NT's domain-based.  Samba doesn't talk to Netware,
and Netware doesn't talk to or in Samba.

It sounds like to do what you're wanting to do you would set Samba up on the
Linux box, connect network drives on your client machines (Windows systems?)
over to the Linux box via Samba.  Have the students save their work on those
particular network drives instead of the Netware drives.

Regarding Netware:

On the client side, the last I heard had Novell working with Caldera to
develop a Netware/NDS-aware client for Linux.

Specifically, I don't know of any way to sync Novell and Linux accounts on
separate servers (there are Netware emulators for Linux, which is why I bother
to make the distinction).

A significant problem would be syncing the passwords from Linux to the Netware
box - since DES encryption - the algorithm (generally) used for encrypting
*nix passwords - is one-way, and thus cannot be decrypted, you have a problem
trying to migrate those passwords into another server since there doesn't
currently exist any decent way to figure out those encrypted passwords (decent
in the sense that it would be usable in this scenario).

So far as synchronizing other information, you'd probably be looking at a
routine similar to the following: extract the account name, description
information, etc, from the Linux box, then use a program to import that data
into Netware and create the accounts accordingly.  I know in Netware 3.x there
were numerous utilities that could do mass account creation by automatically
writing the necessary data to the bindery.  I expect that in 4.x and 5.x there
are comparable tools, but I do not know of them, nor of their costs.

Doug