Do you know of any way to synchronize the NDS password with the screen saver password in Windows 95?

Articles and Tips: qna

01 Jun 1997

Dear Ab-end: o you know of any way to synchronize the NDS password with the screen saver password in Windows 95 so you don't have to change both of them when one changes?

--Outta Sync in Helsinki

Dear Outta Sync: The friendly people at Jan Vejby Telia Data in Sweden offer the following insights into this synchronization problem with the following changes to the Windows 95 registry.

Start the REGEDIT utility (Start | Run, type "regedit" and click OK).
Search for PwdProvider. This search will lead you to the following path:
```
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
System
CurrentControlSet
Control
PwdProvider
```
Look in "NWPASSWD" under the PwdProvider key. The value found in the "ProviderPath" should be "c:\windows\system\nwpasswd.dll"; double-click on the ProviderPath value, then right-click and copy this value to the clipboard.
Open the "SCRSAVE" entry, double-click on the ProviderPath value, and paste the "c:\windows\system\nwpasswd.dll" value into the "ProviderPath" entry.
Create a binary value under SCRSAVE named "UseMasterKey" and give it the value 01 00 00 00. To do this, right-click the mouse button on the "SCRSAVE" page and select New/Binary Value, give the new value entry the name "UseMasterKey" and type in 01 00 00 00 into the Edit Binary Value window. Then click OK.

This little procedure allows the screen saver utility to call to the same NWPASSWD.DLL that the regular NetWare client uses, without storing passwords on the local disk. However, this procedure also means that if your workstation is not connected to the network, you will not see any password associated with the screen saver utility.

I am also told that Netoria offers an advanced screen saver for Microsoft Windows that will also integrate these two passwords. The product is called SFlock and it works with Windows 3.1x, Windows 95, and Windows NT workstation. The new Windows 95 and NT versions of SFLock integrate very tightly with NDS and allow administrators (through an NWAdmin snap-in) to specify what screen savers users in various containers can run, as well as many other features--including synchronizing the local workstation and NDS passwords. You can reach Netoria at their www.netoria.com web site.

* Originally published in Novell AppNotes

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