For more than 15 years Novell was the workhorse for our company providing file, print, and authentication services. With our companies decision to move to Exchange mail last year the decision was made to retire Novell in favor of Windows Active Directory. This decision was not made lightly since the amount of maintenance that everyone knows that Windows requires is enormous and the stories of Novell servers that stayed running for years were infamous. We can attest to this with one of our serves at a remote sites that had been up for close to three years without a hiccup.
Altiris was invaluable in preparing our systems to be joined to the domain and that process went very smoothly. Prying the Novell clients off the machines proved a little more difficult. Given that the users were mostly in our headquarters and well serviced by the Deployment Server we decided to use that for the task. It involved two phases:
After all files were moved from the Novell environment on the Windows shares, the next task was to make the Windows login dominant. This was done by having Altiris execute the following reg hack on the workstation:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Novell\NWGINA] "PassiveMode"=dword:00000001
After we were sure that this had actually done what we intended with a walk around the building before the start of work we executed the 2nd phase which was to actually strip the client off. This was done by executing the following commands:
%systemroot%\system32\NetWare\Nwmigw2k\SETUPW2K.exe /u ms_nwspx %systemroot%\System32\NetWare\Nwmigw2k\SETUPW2K.exe /u ms_nwnb %systemroot%\System32\NetWare\Nwmigw2k\SETUPW2K.exe /u ms_nwipx %systemroot%\System32\NetWare\Nwmigw2k\SETUPW2K.exe /u nw_wm %systemroot%\System32\NetWare\Nwmigw2k\SETUPW2K.exe /u nw_ndps %systemroot%\System32\NetWare\Nwmigw2k\SETUPW2K.exe /u nw_nwfs
For full disclosure, this information is available on the Novell web site as well as a utility called nwrm.exe which will do this for you and then unceremoniously reboot your machine. It's a good idea to reboot the machine anyway but we'd rather do it with a user warning when we do it.
Removing the client marked improved access time to network resources. We think that it would try the Novell ports first before the Windows protocols.