Technical Tip

A Forum reader recently asked:

"We use our proxy servers to deny the Internet to certain groups (about 40 of them). To do this, you have to add the groups to the access rules that are allowing access to certain sites (our school district's homepage, etc.) and to the rule that denies everything else. This means adding 40+ groups more than once.

Is there any way in NBM 3.9 to add multiple NDSObjects at a time? The current method involves clicking the + sign, clicking browse, clicking the group, clicking OK, then starting over for the next group. There must be a better way ...?"

And here is the response from Craig Johnson ...

Solution

1. Using the Backup option, export the rules list to an XML file.

2. Edit the XML file carefully, doing cut and paste.

3. Restore the rules with the Backup option.

Personally, I'd try to redesign NDS to be less reliant on rules. It should be more reliant on a tree structure that would let you point to some OU that has most of the users below it, inheriting the network access that you want. I realize that can't always be done, but usually a design can be improved on, especially if it grew up from an old NetWare 3.x design.