A: Many of our EMU customers have asked us if it is possible to have EMU automatically create eDirectory and GroupWise accounts. That option is not yet available in EMU, however, one of our customers has come up with a BRILLIANT solution!

This Novell Cool Solution article was published by Scott Owen from Alma Public Schools. As you will see in the full article, Scott put together a pretty innovative way to schedule EMU to automatically create eDirectory and GroupWise user accounts based on a text file that is exported daily from their student registration system.

By combining AutoHotKey, Bmail, EMU and a custom EMUScript.AHK script, Scott no longer has to manually run EMU to create accounts - everything is automated! This strategy could come in handy for smaller schools or school districts that do not have the budget for Novell Identity Manager.

The nicest thing about the solution is that it is compatible with all versions of EMU and it's FREE thanks to Scott's willingness to share his solution with you.

The full Cool Solutions article is available at http://www.omni-ts.com/newsroom/automated-user-creation.htm

We would love to hear from you if you are successful in modifying Scott's work and automating the account creation process in your environment. Even better, share your successes and questions in our forum article dedicated to this question.

A: Yes, EMU will check for duplicate accounts in the the entire eDirectory/NDS Tree before you create new users.

A: To register EMU, we require the name of the eDir/NDS tree (or specific containers) that will be managed with EMU. We will send you the licence registration file for your tree. By copying the registration file into the EMU installation directory, you unlock the downloaded version of EMU for your tree.

A: If you have a licence that includes product upgrade and support, then you can download and upgrade EMU. EMU is not designed to support upgrade installations (installing a new version over an existing version). If you are upgrading from a previous version of EMU, you will need to follow these steps:

1. Uninstall EMU.
2. Rename the old EMU installation directory to EMU.OLD.
3. Restart your workstation.
4. Install EMU.
5. Copy any .CP, .LIC and data files from EMU.OLD that you want to retain from your previous installation.
6. After confirming you have all of your files from the previous installation, delete EMU.OLD.

A: EMU has a number of pre-configured reports. One of these reports allows you to select, modify, and/or delete accounts based on last login time, number of days since last login time, never logged in, not used in X days, etc.

A: No. Given the potential amount of network traffic that gets generated when moving a GroupWise account, this feature is not included in EMU. Moving a GroupWise account is an administration task that needs to be done carefully planned and executed.

A: Before using EMU to "move" user home directories, please do a FLAG command on the users` directory structure to remove any HIDDEN or READ ONLY, DELETE INHIBIT rights.

There are acutally two ways to use EMU to "move" user home directories.

Option ONE

1. Highlight the users whose home directories you want to move.
2. Right-click and select the Modify Account(s) Option.
3. Select the Home Directory Tab.
4. Select the Copy Home Directory Option.
5. Check off the Copy Home Directory option and Select Destination will appear.
6. Browse through the volume to locate the parent home directory.
7. (Optional) Select "Create a Batch File to Delete Home Directories." This creates a batch file that you can run after confirming that the data was properly copied to the new location. Although this addes an extra step to the process, it ensures that you control when you want to delete the original user home directories.
8. Select Modify
9. After you have confirmed that the files have been properly copied and the NDS Pointer to the Home Directory has been properly updated, double-click on the batch file. This will delete the users home directories. You will need a copy of DELTREE for this to work.

Please note that any files that are flagged as hidden or system files, open files or other "locked" files such as temporary files that are in the user home directories will not be copied to the new home directory destination.

Option TWO

This is probably the quicker method. If the home directory destination parent is the same for all of your users (or a large number), or if the home directory locations are the same for all users in a particular context, you can use the following steps:

1. Use NCOPY, COPY or a tape backup/restore process to copy the data to the appropriate destination.
2. Highlight the appropriate users in EMU.
3. Select Right-click and select the Modify Account(s) Option.
4. Select the Home Directory Tab.
5. Select the Modify Home Dir. - Adv. option.
6. Check off the Reassign NDS Home Directory Points and identify the New Parent Directory.
7. Select Modify to continue.

After the modification is finished, you need to re-establish the Trustee Assignments to the home directories. This is done by selecting the students a second time and selecting the Modify Home Dir option. This will allow you to re-assign Trustee Assignments to the new user home directories, set Home Directory Size Limits and set Volume Size Limits on the volume containing the user Home Directory.

A: When you create a user with those settings in ConsoleOne, this is what happens to the NDS account:

• Login Grace Remaining: 1
• Password Expiration Time: NOW
• Password Required: True

You can recreate these settings in EMU by going to the Password Restriction tab when creating a user and selecting the following options:

• Allow User to Change Password.
• Require a Password (activates the other options).
• Force Periodic Password Changes (activates other options).
• Set Date Password Expires to right now or yesterday.

A: To date, the largest NDS tree managed by EMU contained 80,000 user objects. The upper limit of objects that can be managed in one EMU session is a function of the speed and perfomance of your hardware and network configuration. Time to display information on 12,000 NDS users in a single container: 12 seconds. Time to display information on 12,000 GroupWise users in a single post office: 30 seconds. This benchmark was created on a Pentium II 350MHz computer with 128MB of RAM, running Windows 98, Client32 Version 3.1.0.0, connecting to a Pentium II 266 NetWare 5.0 server running GroupWise 5.5 on 256MB of RAM over a switched 10 megabit Ethernet network. Following are settings that can increase performance when creating or managing large numbers of home directories. This information was taken from a Novell TID that describes how to improve performance when large directory structures are involved: set dirty directory cache delay time = 0.5 seconds set directory cache allocation wait time = 0.5 seconds set maximum directory cache buffers = 4000 set minimum directory cache buffers = 2000

A: First, create a column labelled 'Groups'. For each record, specify each of the group names to which you want to add the user when you create them using full NDS path syntax separated by semi-colons betweeb each group. For example: .cn=group2.ou=grade.ou=school.o=district;.cn=group3.ou=grade.ou=school.o=district

A: It would be best not to use a file to add members of group '1e' to the group '2e'. The best way is to highlight the group object '1e' and right-click and select "Modify Members of this Group". Uncheck any users you don't want to modify, and continue. Under the NDS Group option, select to add them to the group '2e'.

A: If you are using Windows XP or Windows 2000 and get the following error: "Run-time error '339'; Component 'MSCOMCT2.OCX or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid.", this means your workstation installation is missing a file. Download this zip file to resolve this problem and extract the contents to your %WINDIR%\SYSTEM32 folder (where %WINDIR% is the installation directory for Windows). Run the following command at a DOS/command prompt.

%WINDIR%\SYSTEM32\REGSVR32.EXE %WINDIR%\SYSTEM32\mscomct2.ocx Ex.
C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\REGSVR32.EXE C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\MSCOMCT2.OCX

NOTE: A possible problem has been identified when running EMU on Windows XP workstations that have the ZENWorks 4 client installed. There appears to be a conflict between the ZENWorks 4 client and the Workstation Manager option that is required to support the APIs that are used with EMU. Until this conflict has been resolved, you might not be able to use the ZENWorks 4 client on Windows XP workstations that will be used with EMU. If you have this problem, we recommend you download the latest NetWare client.