From: MENNECKE@NW42.WIWI.UNI-BIELEFELD.DE (Juergen Mennecke)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.novell
Subject: Re: Setting up Students on 3.11
Date: 11 Sep 92 10:06:17 GMT
Reply-To: Novell LAN Interest Group <NOVELL@SUVM.BITNET>
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
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>
>    We will be changing our current networks from IBM PC LAN to
> Novell 3.11 in the next few weeks.
>    With the PC LAN our workstations were not required to enter a
> User ID and Password and since 99 percent of the users on these
> networks were students we had no problems with this setup.
>    Now our Novell File Servers will be shared between Faculty and
> Students, thus we need more security(one of the reasons for going
> to Novell).
>    How are yall handling this problem in the rest of the working world.
>
>                           Thanks

James,

I'm in the process of doing the same: Sharing a file server between the
faculty and the students. Here's how I'm going to do it:

For projects that are to use eMail I have a separate account for every
project member to enable people to respond directly to the sender.
Projects that don't need eMail get a single account without password (we
have a student lab with 10 machines, so I hope to be on the safe side as
regards simultaneous connections of the same account).

Programs are run via a central batch file directory which is put
into the path via the system login script (search drive). Since it is
possible for the faculty to have local configurations for software (makes
batch files pretty complicated occasionally), which is not desirable for
the student lab, I needed different batch files for the two
environments. The batch files for student use are in a separate directory
now. Therefore I decided to split the system login script --- one section
for the faculty and one for the students.

I do this by putting every student account into a group and checking this
group at the beginning of the system login script. If the person who logs
in is in that group, I include the student section and jump to a label at
the end of the system login script afterwards. At the moment, there are no
rights to be gained by membership in the student group, except that this
group is Queue User of the lab-printqueue.

Faculty personnel who run projects have the option to get the student
environment (for test purposes, for instance) by specifying a command line
argument when logging in. If the command line parameter is specified, a
warning message is generated saying that printer output gets redirected to
the lab printer (just in case...).

Totally splitting the system login script may look a bit like overkill,
since the only differences between the two sections are printer redirection
and the search drive for the batch directory, but I thought life would be
much easier this way in the future, should need be for any additions to
the faculty or the student sections.

Finally (I hope) I added two lines to every faculty batch file that check
if the user who calls it is member of the student group. This could
happen if a student would change drive and directory to the faculty batch
file directory, which is possible since that directory resides under
SYS:PUBLIC (design flaw?). In that case the batch would just display an
error message and exit. The check is necessary since the faculty batch
files rely on a certain local directory on the faculty-workstation, which
would be hard to maintain in the lab.

I hope this works.....

J. Mennecke