Environment
Novell ZENworks 10 Configuration Management with Support Pack 1 - 10.1
Novell ZENworks Configuration Management 11.1
Novell ZENworks Configuration Management 11.2
Situation
How is GINA configured with the Novell ZENworks agent?
Resolution
During installation of the ZCM Agent, the user management module will check for third party applications' GINA that may exist on the workstation. If one is found, the install will set up a chain with the existing GINAs to ensure that nwgina.dll will be loaded and called by them.
The ZCM Agent may fail to set NWGINA into the chain with some 3rd party GINAs. If this happens, often the 3rd party GINA can be manually configured to include the NWGINA in the chain.
If no third party GINAs exist except Microsoft GINA, then the install will internally set up a GINA chain:
NWGina chains to Microsoft GINA
which causes the agent to see the Microsoft GINA login dialog that comes directly from Microsoft GINA.
To set this up, install creates a GinaDLL registry value with value nwgina.dll, to make nwgina.dll the primary GINA. This causes the Novell Gina to be loaded by Winlogon.
Modifying the GinaDLL registry value to set nwgina.dll is the expected behavior of the ZENworks Configuration Management agent install.
When other 3rd party GINAs are not present, and only Novell GINA and Microsoft GINA are on the machine, then the Novell GINA is first in the chain and will chain to MSGina.dll, which will be last in the chain.
The following error indicates that nwgina.dll may be corrupted or missing from windows\system32:
When other 3rd party GINAs are not present, and only Novell GINA and Microsoft GINA are on the machine, then the Novell GINA is first in the chain and will chain to MSGina.dll, which will be last in the chain.
The following error indicates that nwgina.dll may be corrupted or missing from windows\system32:
User Interface Failure
The Logon Interface DLL C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\NWGINA.dllFailed to load
Contact you System Administrator to replace the DLL, or Restore the original DLL
Since nwgina.dll is installed along with Novell Client, for this error it is possible that a Novell Client un-install may have removed the dll.
Generally, this won't happen as un-installation of any of the products such as NWClient32, NSL, ZENworks 7, ZCM, XTier should not remove the DLL if at least one of the products exists. nwgina.dll is shared among these products.
If the nwgina.dll is missing or corrupted but is still set in the registry, it can be unset in safe mode to allow login (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\GinaDLL).
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\GinaDLL).