I am the user administrator for a school...

Articles and Tips: qna

01 Sep 2003

I am the user administrator for a school and every summer I have the same problem: How do I create, delete, and change about 900 users? I want to develop an application that does this for me.

It seems like Java and LDAP would help me achieve this easily, but I have two questions: Can I use LDAP for my GroupWise accounts? And can I use LDAP for my ZENworks settings? Is there a better solution?

Using LDAP to modify user settings is easy to do and a very good way to make changes to eDirectory, but it relies on two conditions:

The setting is stored in the eDirectory, and
The setting is documented somewhere so you can know the syntax for changing it.

For GroupWise, some properties are stored in the eDirectory and some are not. You can learn more about which properties are stored in the directory and which are stored in the GroupWise database from the GroupWise forums.

For ZENworks, the engineering team has never documented their schema, so it's often hard to understand how the various fields are used. In some cases, octet strings or octet lists are used, which are very obscure. I've seen some developers in various developer forums post very specific solutions that are based on reverse-engineering these fields, but Novell does not officially support this.

You may want to post in the ZENworks forum on http://support-forums.novell.com and request information about the schema. It's always good for the groups to hear such requests so that maybe they will publish this information in the future.

* Originally published in Novell AppNotes

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