Netware supervisor

[Oops_my_bad]

Was visiting a guy at a nearby school on Friday who was in the unfortunate position of starting in the job whilst the guy that worked there before him having emmigrated to Spain with all the passwords.

If that wasn't bad enough, this chap has been lumbered with a novell network. We were trying to to get into this network with the few "admin" passwords he has but none of them seemed to have the right level of permissions. We have an administrator username and password but I always thought the top cheese in Novell was the "supervisor" account? Unless this has changed recently we couldn't find this account in consoleOne. Is "administrator" the highest account now? I cant remember what version of novell it was - 6 perhaps? Was thinking if he cant get the supervisor account he'll have to rebuild from scratch - worthy time to go 2003 vanilla maybe?

[riedquat]

The supervisor account hasn't really existed since versions 3 of Netware. In Netware versions 4 and above with the move to NDS/edirectory an admin account was introduced called unsurprisingly 'admin' and can be found within the topmost level of the tree. There may well be a supervisor account present within the tree but this will only be there for legacy bindary support. Therefore for Netware version 6 (if that is indeed what is in use) and the ficticious topmost ou of myschool,the master admin account will be admin.myschool

Depending upon where you are attempting to use the account from you may need to use a fully distinguished name, ie. cn=admin.o=myschool

If you have lost of forgotten the password for the admin account, you really only have 3 options.

1) Use another account with admin level access to reset the password on the admin account
2) Open an incident with Novell who will be able to reset the admin account for a fee
3) Use an unsupported tool to create a new admin level account in the tree to enable you to perform option 1. (note that this will require physical access to the server console) For obvious reasons i'm not gonna say where to find one in public.

[Oops_my_bad]

OK, thanks riedquat. I'll point him in the direction of this thread.

Interesting that novell charge for getting back in to your own system - surely this means there is a dangerous backdoor into netware!

[riedquat]

Interesting that novell charge for getting back in to your own system - surely this means there is a dangerous backdoor into netware!

Not really that dangerous as Novell will basically have you send them a copy of the normally inaccessible dib files (these are not normally accessabile whilst the server is running and only via special tools). Novell will then basically 'rewrite' the files and send them back. Oh and the files have to be from a master or full r/w replica to be any use.

Of course nothing is secure if you can get physical access to the box in the first place.