Forcing Global Password Changes on NetWare 6.5 Server

Novell Cool Solutions: Tip
By Aaron Burgemeister

Digg This - Slashdot This Posted: 28 Feb 2007

Problem

A Forum reader recently asked:

"Does anyone know an easy way to force a global password change on our NetWare 6.5 server users? It's a single tree with SP5 on it."

And here's the response from Novell's Aaron Burgemeister ...

Solution

You can expire them all via LDIF. Here's what you need to do:

1. From Linux, run the following command to export/import the LDIF:

ldapsearch -h ipAddress -p 389 -D cn=admin,dc=context,dc=goes,dc=here -x
- -W objectClass=user dn > outFile.ldif

2. You'll be prompted for a password - even if you don't see the prompt, be sure to type it in.

cp outFile.ldif inFile.ldif

3. Modify the file here, adding the following lines to each DN line:

changetype: modify
add: passwordexpirationtime
passwordexpirationtime: 20070101010000Z

4. Import it back in.

ldapmodify -h ipAddress -p 389 -D cn=admin,dc=context,dc=goes,dc=here -x
- -W -f ./inFile.ldif

Looking at the users, they should all have passwords expiring at 1 a.m. (UTC) New Year's Day 2007. For modifying the LDIF you should have no problems with a decent text editor. JEdit (free, cross-platform), UltraEdit (free trial, Windows only), CoolEdit and EditPlus (free trial, Windows only) are all options. Notepad/Wordpad/word will not do what you need them to without a lot of pain and suffering, so I wouldn't even try there unless you are a macro king/queen.

Reader Comments

• Aaron, IMHO you do not need to know macro - a simple Search / Replace in Word would do the job. From memory just replace the ^p^pdn: with "your three lines here, with EOL's in the right places"^p^pdn: ( ^p stands for end of paragraph in Word - check special symbols under Replace ). That should insert your text before every dn: ( including the very first one that you will have to fix manually ) and the blank line.

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