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Before you read the rest of this dated article, read the documentation here:
Enforcing Case-Sensitive Universal Passwords - How to Make Your Password Case-Sensitive

Then ignore this article and follow the above directions!
Thanks to Aaron with NTS for clarifying. The xad directory that I mention in the article is part of the Domain Services for Windows on OES2.

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Do you use case sensitive passwords with eDirectory 8.8 over LDAP? Are you sure? Turns out that /etc/init.d/ndsd appears to have an error.

I was recently working through some test scripts and thought that my eDirectory 8.8.3 was using case sensitive universal passwords over LDAP. To my surprise, it was not.

I did some digging and found that for Universal Password to be tried first via LDAP, the environment variable NDSD_TRY_NMASLOGIN_FIRST must be set to true in the /etc/init.d/ndsd startup script.

Reference:

http://www.novell.com/support/viewContent.do?externalId=3307424&sliceId=1

When I looked at that script what I found was the following:

79 if [ -d /opt/novell/xad/lib/nds-modules ]; then
80 NDSD_TRY_NMASLOGIN_FIRST=true
81 export NDSD_TRY_NMASLOGIN_FIRST
82 fi

The problem here is that /opt/novell/xad/lib/nds-modules doesn't exist so these values are never set. I'm not sure whether this is intentional or not, but I then searched for all files called nds-modules and the only one present in the file system was: /opt/novell/eDirectory/lib/nds-modules

With that info in hand I updated the ndsd start script to the following:

79 ##########CORRECTED########### if [ -d /opt/novell/xad/lib/nds-modules ]; then
80 if [ -d /opt/novell/eDirectory/lib/nds-modules ]; then
81 NDSD_TRY_NMASLOGIN_FIRST=true
82 export NDSD_TRY_NMASLOGIN_FIRST
83 fi

A restart of eDirectory and now my LDAP passwords are case sensitive.

While this is well documented in the above TID, I do wonder why this if statement is present, and why not make it the default.

Hope you find this helpful.

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.