Blog Entry

SrLoinofBeef's picture
blog
Reads:

6193

Score:
0
0
 
Comments:

5

OPEN CALL: Easy updating of Novell User Accounts

Author Info

29 February 2008 - 12:57pm
Submitted by: SrLoinofBeef

Tags

(View Disclaimer)

I am new to Novell...Sorry! I have been asked to update 20000 user ID's comment fields. Why did they ask me? Because the Admin responsible has less experience then I do...LOL

I really need your help. Can this be done with a script and input file? If yes can someone give me some ideas how to begin? or sample code or cool reading or do the work for me so I can look good!

Reaaly, I have 2 weeks or some poor guy is going to do it Manually using Netware Admin.

Step by Step is Appreciated.

Help if you can!


Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.




User Comments

FlyingGuy's picture

Depends

Submitted by FlyingGuy on 29 February 2008 - 5:18pm.

Are you running in a NetWare Environment? If so, what version?

bthoreson's picture

LDAP? LDIF?

Submitted by bthoreson on 29 February 2008 - 9:40pm.

You should be able to do this using LDAP and or LDIF. If you have any programming skills you can use your favorite scripting language, mine PHP, but many others PERL, and many others with LDAP APIs.

Good Luck

FlyingGuy's picture

Off for the weekend?

Submitted by FlyingGuy on 1 March 2008 - 4:06pm.

OK, well you haven't replied so I will just assume you have a NetWare server someplace in your plant with a read/write copy of your NDS database on it.

You can use Novell Script for Netware (NSN ) at least I think. The documentation for this is on developer.novell.com.

If you have ever written a VB script it will be very familiar.
You should be able to iterate through all the user objects in NDS and update the desired data.

My guess is that it more then likely it will be very fast, under a couple of minutes, for the script to update the desired data. If you have multiple servers with multiple copies of the DS database, I would suggest going into DSREPAIR and scheduling an immediate sync, especially if some servers are across WAN links.

rudd_j's picture

Use LDIF and ICE

Submitted by rudd_j on 1 March 2008 - 6:00pm.

The best way to make large bulk changes is through LDAP, using LDIF and ICE.

You can usually write a script to auto-generate LDIF files from your data source.
You may need to run something like DS Report to collect the DN, full name and uniqueID of users to match to your data.
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/13894.html

There is lots of info around on writing LDIF files.

Hope this helps.

geoffc's picture

Other tool options

Submitted by geoffc on 3 March 2008 - 8:40am.

In addition the LDAP/LDIF/ICE you can use other tools. One example would be JRB Software's SETNAME tool.

www.jrbsoftware.com has a tool set with hundreds of super useful command line (and some GUI) tools to do things you need to do.

GETNAME lists the users CN. Add the /a="Home Directory" and you get the CN and then the value of the Home Directory attribute. And so on.

SETNAME is the write version of GETNAME. Basically you could:
CX to the correct tree context.
SETNAME * /a="Description" "The generic value"

It will read an input file, if you need a different value per user... Generate the input file however you like.

There are other equivalent NCP based tools from other vendors to do this.

So far the suggestions have been to do it the same basic way, just using LDAP instead of NCP. Tomato, tomaatoo.

© 2013 Novell