Thursday, August 11, 2005

eDirectory & a lab full of Linux machines

As I've mentioned in previous posts, we're in the process of putting together a hundred-seater lab running Novell Linux Desktop. Well with an image completed and tested, we took the opportunity on Tuesday to ghost the lab.

This had an interesting effect on our network that we only noticed during the course of Wednesday (once normal load returned) — it caused a significant increase in the CPU usage on three of our Netware servers. The spike can be seen in the graph below:

posted by guy at: 20:21 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link

Monday, August 08, 2005

PAM, ncpfs and timeouts

We're currently putting together a disk image for a lab full of Linux machines at Rhodes. The image is based on Novell Linux Desktop 9 and uses our existing Novell eDirectory for authentication and home directories.

In order to achieve this we've made heavy use of the ncpfs package. ncpfs provides a way for Linux users to mount Novell NSS volumes. It contains a series of userland tools (such as ncpmount) to allow users to mount remote volumes, print to Novell print queues, etc. It also contains a contributed PAM module (pam_ncp_auth) that allows us to automate most of this.

posted by guy at: 15:03 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link

Friday, August 05, 2005

Novell, LDAP, FreeRADIUS, CIFS, Universal Password, etc.

I've spent the last couple of months trying to get FreeRADIUS to use our Novell eDirectory for authentication. It worked well on our test network, but I haven't been able to get it to work on our production network. This week, however, the pieces all came together.

posted by guy at: 21:19 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link