Novell Welcomes The NT Invasion
By James Drews
February 15, 1997, Issue: 803
Section: Sneak Previews
Novell Welcomes The NT Invasion
By James Drews
Despite all the hype about Windows NT coming from Microsoft Corp.'s
headquarters in Redmond, Wash., NT is more than holding its own in the
corporate network. So developers are making sure their applications run
under NT and not just Windows95. Even Novell is embracing the NT
invasion with its release of Novell Workstation Manager. An integral part
of the IntranetWare Client for NT, Novell Workstation Manager is a
Novell Directory Service (NDS)-enabled product that lets administrators
centrally control and manage NT 3.51 and 4.0. At the Computer-Aided
Engineering Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we are
deploying NT workstations in our lab (a mostly NetWare shop). We
looked at the beta version of this product with anticipation and were quite
impressed with it. The open beta and final release of the Novell
Workstation Manager is available for download from
support.novell.com/home.
Take Us to Your Leader The Novell Workstation Manager consists of
two parts. The first is the IntranetWare Client for NT, which replaces the
standard NT Login process with its own Graphical Identification and
Authentication (NWGINA) module. Because NWGINA runs at the
administrative level on an NT workstation, it has enhanced access to the
NT workstation. This increased access gives the IntranetWare client the
ability to manage certain features of the NT workstation. The second
component is an NDS Schema extension, which is controlled by a snap-in
for the Windows NT NetWare Administrator (NWADMNNT.EXE).
With this simple addition, you can control certain aspects of the NT
workstations by creating NT workstation objects in the NDS tree.
With the NT workstation objects, you can control trivial items, from the
bitmap displayed in the NT CTRL-ALT-DEL welcome screen, to the
policy file enforced for users on the NT workstation. These objects also
let you dynamically create accounts on the local NT workstation, provide
automatic client updates of the IntranetWare client, enable roaming
profiles, let you control which tabs are displayed on the login screen and
provide login script processing.
One of the best features of Novell Workstation Manager is its ability to
create accounts on each NT workstation when the user logs in. Because
NT is a secure environment, a login to the NT workstation-in addition to
the NetWare login-is required. With the Workstation Manager, the
account for the NT machine can be created on the fly. It can be generic,
or it can use the user information from NetWare to create the account.
Novell Workstation Manager also can add a number of group
memberships to the account.
To keep the NT workstation's local Secure Access Manager (SAM)
from getting filled with accounts that may not be used again, the
dynamically created account can automatically be removed upon logout.
In our environment, this capability will save us quite a bit of time and will
be worth its weight in gold. We have a roaming population of more than
4,000 students who need to use NT workstations. Creating accounts for
all these users in NetWare and an NT domain would be quite an effort.
This feature alone will save many hours of administration for large
NetWare shops. In addition, access can be restricted based on NT group
membership.
Novell Workstation Manager also lets you maintain roaming profiles,
which let you customize certain settings (background wallpaper, color
scheme and screen saver, for example) in NT and keep them as you
move from NT workstation to workstation. Part of the roaming profiles is
the storage of the NTUSER.DAT file. This file is the NT Registry hive for
the HKEY_CURRENT_USER. It stores user preferences from
applications and the NT environment.
One problem with roaming profiles involves application preferences. NT
applications store user preferences in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER
portion of the registry. When you add an application to the system, there
is no way to preset all the application's settings for every user. This can be
a big problem, because quite often the application's default settings just
won't work.
Each NT workstation object can be associated with a combination of
User, Group, Organizational Unit or Organization objects in the NDS
tree, making life easier both for users and the administrator. Users or
groups of users can have different properties set for their account based
on his or her needs.
Novell Workstation Manager can control which Login Window Tabs are
displayed. Why confuse users with extra tabs of options that can get set
with wrong values? With the tabs hidden, the information contained on
them can be set worry-free. Such information includes what login script to
run, the profile script and any login script variables.
James E. Drews is a network administrator for the Computer-Aided
Engineering Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He can be reached at drews@engr.wisc.edu.
Copyright r 1997 CMP Media Inc.
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