Hello, first of all, I am a web designer with only rudimentary knowledge of W2K/NT users/groups/permissions and domains, so please bear with me if my competence level is a bit limited :)
My company wants to use Snitz as an internal forum on a web server on our LAN (win2k/IIS 5.0). Our system admins will use Novell Directory Service (we use this in lieu of Active Directory) to authenticate user access to this particular server.
My questions: my boss does not want to force users to log on again to post to Snitz. Judging from this forum, Snitz can integrate with NT permissions/user/groups, is there a way to modify to authenticate against NDS as well?
I'm not sure if NDS is readily available like built-in NT permissions. I know in an ASP application we built on one of our web servers I used an ActiveX control to authenticate remote logins against existing an existing NT groups/users. Would NDS work in the same way in this regard?
I'm currently looking at doing something similar, I'm happy to share what I've got so far...I found an ODBC driver for NDS at http://developer.novell.com/ndk/odbc.htm which means you could hack the forum to authenticate against NDS rather than the FORUM_MEMBERS table. So far I reckon this would work but it only saves users having to set up their accounts (which some here have found difficult). They would still have to physically log in. I don't yet know how to pick up the current user from NDS as you would use Request.ServerVariables("AUTH_USER") in NT. Some client-side script maybe?
Just by way of explanation here, NT authentication happens between the client and the server automatically based upon the directory permissions and the settings for the application in IIS. You don't need to write any code for NT authentication (other than for presentation of login name or whatever).
To authenticate with NDS, however, you will definitely need to write code: I would imagine an include file that will pick up some object property from the client that proves it is logged in (and as whom) which is then passed over to the server which check against NDS to ensure it's valid.
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Posted - 10 April 2002 : 03:30:27
