7.0 History of Novell Passwords

In the past, administrators have had to manage multiple passwords (simple password, NDS® password, enhanced password) because of password limitations. Administrators have also needed to deal with keeping the passwords synchronized.

Universal Password was created to address these password problems. It provides:

Universal Password is managed by the Secure Password Manager, a component of the NMAS™ module (nmas.nlm on NetWare). Secure Password Manager simplifies the management of password-based authentication schemes across a wide variety of Novell® products as well as Novell partner products. The management tools only expose one password and do not expose all of the behind-the-scenes processing for backwards compatibility.

Secure Password Manager and the other components that manage or make use of Universal Password are installed as part of the NetWare® 6.5 or later and eDirectory 8.7.3 or later install; however, Universal Password is not enabled by default. Because all APIs for authentication and setting passwords are moving to support Universal Password, all the existing management tools, when run on clients with these new libraries, automatically work with the Universal Password.

NOTE:The Password Management plug-in is available for download at the Novell Free Download Site.

The Novell Client supports the Universal Password. It also continues to support the NDS password for older systems in the network. The Novell Client™ has the capability of automatically migrating the NDS password to the Universal Password at the time of the first login.

When the NDS password is migrated to the Universal password, the password expiration time is recalculated from the current time plus the password expiration interval.

For more information about deploying and managing Universal Password, see the Password Management Administration Guide.