6.0 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. 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 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 Downloads Web 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.

For NMAS 3.2x and earlier, 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 NMAS 3.3 and later, password expiration time is not updated when the NDS password is migrated to the Universal Password unless the “Verify whether existing passwords comply with the password policy (verification occurs on login)” password policy rule is set to “true”.

For more information about deploying and managing Universal Password, see the Novell Password Management 3.3.2 Administration Guide.