Suggestions & stuff

[Mike Brodbelt]

Gerald Carter wrote:
> 
> greg wrote:
> >
> > For future NT Domain releases (3.0 or whatever) you
> > should really support nt administrative tools
> > (event viewer, server manager, user mananger etc...
> > Hopefully you can get it to work with nexus also.
> 
> Greg,  Thanks for the suggestions.  We will keep those
> in mind.  Just curious, but what would you want to
> use the Event Viewer to see?  Syslog files?  Samba
> logs?  EventViewer is a horrible logfile viewer IMO
> and the return benefit for implementing the server side
> RPCs necessary would not be a big payoff.

For my 2p worth, I'd think that event viewer sould be pretty far down
the priority list. The tool is not very good, and in the absence of all
the NT "this/that/the other has failed" messages, is largely irrelevant
to administration. If it were to be implemented, I'd want the security
log first and foremost, but even this I consider of very low importance.
 
> Server Manager?  User Manager?  Both of these qill require
> possible editing of /etc/passwd (let's please not bring up
> the machine accounts in /etc/passwd again ok?  At least
> not for right now).

Technical considerations aside for a moment, these are two tools I do
regard as important for Samba to support. I'm sure many installations of
Samba come into contact with people who don't know Unix that well, if at
all. If it's possible to turn round and say "you can use NT admin
tools", then a big anti-Samba argument goes away from the ease of use
angle.

I fully appreciate the technical difficulties, and don't have answers to
many of them yet, but I still feel the functionality is important. For
Server Manager, I'd be happy with a set up where machine accounts were
placed in a Samba specific file (tdb?), and then that file could be
changed by the RPC mechanism, obviating the need for this service to
muck with /etc/passwd, which I admit to a sense of unease about.

> > time.. I once saw this winnt program/win98
> > program that would log a user out like saying "
> > You have 5 minutes left before you are logged out
> > of the system."
> 
> Does WinNT do this using valid logon times?  Or are
> you asking for something that enforces policies like
> you can stay logged on for 60 minutes at a time?
> This could entirely be done in client side functionality
> using the userinit reigstry key to specify the user's
> shell.

I used to run NT clients on a Novell server, Each account could have
valid logon times specfied on the server, and you'd be kicked off the
system automatically when you reached the end of your approved hours. NT
has all the same options, though I've not actually used them.

Mike.