UA Library > Intranet Home   This University of Arizona Library site is archived and is not maintained.

Subject: Logging in: the Outtakes.

A LISTperson pointed out that I was omitting a section on NT logins in my attempt to be brief and to the point, so here it is. I had mentioned that you have to log in to a windows NT machine to even use it, and that the way we have things setup that means logging in to the NT "Domain" called LIB-NT. Then we've set up staff to automatically connect to the Library Novell server so that they can share "T drive" files, use MS Office, etc. Some staff also maintain Web pages on the library's Web server, Dizzy, and the usual process to edit those files is for them to have an account on Dizzy, run Qvtnet, login, and run a unix text editor such as Pico. NT and win95, in combination with a free program called "Samba" that runs on Dizzy, allow you to connect to Dizzy in the same style as connecting to Novell, in other words Dizzy's web directory (\\dizzy\webdir as NT sees it) can be made to look like another drive on your own machine. So you can have for example:

A: local floppy drive (local means physically on your desktop)

C: local hard drive

D: local cdrom

F: Library Novell files (not local, on the "Library" server)

...

W: Dizzy's webdir (not local, on Dizzy)

The advantage of this is that you can then use that pretty user-friendly file manager interface to navigate on Dizzy, and edit the files with programs on your local machine rather than pico.

But remember how I had said earlier that the automatic reconnection to these servers depends on the username and password being the same on all the different accounts? Well that was a bit oversimplified, for some types of network connections NT will ask for the password whether it is the same or different as a security precaution (and the Dizzy password will usually be different than the LIB-NT/Novell common one anyway, due to Dizzy's security requirements) Of course if you then type it in wrong it will complain; the thing to remember here is that a failure to login at that point, after you have logged into NT itself, will only affect those resources and not the system as a whole. I can setup NT to reconnect me to 20 different servers when I re-login to NT, and if I fail to supply the password for one of them, I can still have my connections to the others. When the first error comes up NT will allow me to retry, cancel this current one, or cancel all of the reconnections.

NT is much less fragile than networking based on MS-Dos in this respect, it will keep on running even if all of the servers crash around it, and will just report that they aren't available. MS-Dos machines usually crash along with the server. By the way, the new NT machines in Central Ref. which also have the cdrom Lan programs on them, in addition to Netscape, are configured to automatically connect to Satch, our Novell server that controls the cdrom Lan, as well as to the cdrom servers themselves, using the same process as I was explaining above for staff logins. So there's a lot of flexibility here once you understand some of this complexity.