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FSLOGIN Full Screen Login.
Version 1.1, march 1993.
A utility for all Novell NetWare users.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Please enter your Login Data ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ ║
║ Server YOUR_SERVER.................. ║
║ ║
║ Userid YOUR_USERID.................. ║
║ ║
║ Password ............................. ║
║ ║
║ ┌──────┐ ║
║ │Accept│ ║
║ └──────┘ ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
(c) Confirm 1993, The Netherlands, All rights reserved.
Author: Aad Slingerland
Contents of this document
=========================
The Shareware concept
The purpose of this program
How to install
How to use
Pre-filling the fields
Special keys
Password expired!
Some other features
Some questions and answers
Summary of changes
Registration and support
Credits
=======
It is worthwile mentioning the effort of a group of colleagues
and friends who have together done a fine job looking,
testing, talking, phoning, faxing, criticizing and cheering me
up again. They helped, and often still help FSLOGIN growing.
The Shareware concept
=====================
Shareware distribution gives users a chance to try software
before buying it. If you try a Shareware program and continue
using it, you are expected to register. Individual programs
differ on details. Some request registration while others
require it, some specify a maximum trial period. With
registration, you get anything from the simple right to
continue using the software to an updated program with printed
manual.
Copyright laws apply to both Shareware and commercial
software, and the copyright holder retains all rights, with a
few specific exceptions as stated below. Shareware authors are
accomplished programmers, just like commercial authors, and
the programs are of comparable quality. (In both cases, there
are good programs and bad ones!) The main difference is in the
method of distribution. The author specifically grants the
right to copy and distribute the software, either to all or to
a specific group. For example, some authors require written
permission before a commercial disk vendor may copy their
software.
Shareware is a distribution method, not a type of software.
You should find software that suits your needs, whether it's
commercial or Shareware. The Shareware system makes fitting
your needs easier, because you can try before you buy. And
because the overhead is low, prices are also low. Shareware
has the ultimate money-back guarantee -- if you don't use the
product, you don't pay for it.
DISCLAIMER - AGREEMENT
Users of FSLOGIN must accept this disclaimer of warranty:
"FSLOGIN is supplied as is. The author disclaims all
warranties, expressed or implied, including, without
limitation, the warranties of merchantability and of fitness
for any purpose. The author assumes no liability for damages,
direct or consequential, which may result from the use of
FSLOGIN."
FSLOGIN is a "shareware program" and is provided at no charge
to the user for evaluation. Feel free to share it with your
friends, but please do not give it away altered or as part of
another system. The essence of "user-supported" software is
to provide personal computer users with quality software
without high prices, and yet to provide incentive for
programmers to continue to develop new products. If you find
this program useful and find that you are using FSLOGIN and
continue to use FSLOGIN after a trial period of 30 days, you
must make a registration payment to Confirm. The registration
fee will license one copy for use on any one Novell NetWare
server at any one time. You must treat this software just
like a book. An example is that this software may be used by
any number of people and may be freely moved from one server
location to another, so long as there is no possibility of it
being used at one location while it's being used at another.
Just as a book cannot be read by two different persons at the
same time.
Commercial users of FSLOGIN must register and pay for their
copies of FSLOGIN within 30 days of first use or their license
is withdrawn. Site-License arrangements may be made by
contacting Confirm.
Anyone distributing FSLOGIN for any kind of remuneration must
first contact Confirm at the address below for authorization.
This authorization will be automatically granted to
distributors recognized by the (ASP) as adhering to its
guidelines for shareware distributors, and such distributors
may begin offering FSLOGIN immediately (However Confirm must
still be advised so that the distributor can be kept
up-to-date with the latest version of FSLOGIN.).
You are encouraged to pass a copy of FSLOGIN along to your
friends for evaluation. Please encourage them to register
their copy if they find that they can use it.
The purpose of this program
===========================
All the PC users who are connected to a local area network
with Novell servers, have at least one thing in common. They
must login to the network, before applications and data become
available. It's obvious that this is almost always done using
the standard Novell login program. This command line utility,
however, isn't very attractive to use and does not do a fine
job, when users must be informed about network exceptions or
errors.
It is my goal to enhance the way you can login to a server, by
providing you with a full screen, Novell menu style program.
FSLOGIN is not only a different way to type some data, like
the userid and the password, but does extensive checking of
accounting and security exceptions. All kinds of reasons why a
user cannot login to a server, are presented in clear text in
a full screen window. Because the user is properly informed of
certain exceptions, he or she wil be able to communicate
better with the system administrator, instead of complaining
something like "I cannot login!".
The actual Novell login command line utility is only executed
after various checks on correctness of names, accounting and
security matters have been done. Almost nothing but a file
server that goes down at that particular moment, can go wrong
now.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Login Status │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ │
│ The login process to the choosen file server │
│ with the choosen userid cannot be completed. │
│ │
│ One of the security measures prevented this. │
│ You will have to contact the system admini- │
│ strator to clear this situation. │
│ │
│ The precise errorcode and reason is: │
│ │
│ Errorcode : 197 │
│ Reason : intruder lockout │
│ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────┘
How to install
==============
Installing the Full Screen Login program can be done in three
stages, of which the first stage is required. The stages two
and three are optional, and using them depends on the
preference of the system administrator.
The first stage installs FSLOGIN on the Novell server, and is
basically enough to make it available for use.
The second stage is distributing one of the programs of
FSLOGIN to PC's with a local harddisk. The benefit of this is,
that this program is capable of 'finding' the SYS:LOGIN
directory, even if it is on a network drive like Z:.
The third stage is renaming the program fslogin.com to
login.com. This makes the Full Screen Login program the one
that's always used, and you don't have to change existing
batch files, where 'login' is called.
Stage One.
. Execute the installation batch file (INSTALL.BAT) from
the drive and directory where the files of FSLOGIN reside.
This batch files copies the files FSLOGIN.* to the directory
SYS:LOGIN and flag them as read-only shareable.
Second the file FSLOGIN.COM is copied to the SYS:PUBLIC
directory and also flagged read-only shareable.
! When you are using a NetWare 2.xx server, you must grant a
trustee assignment to the group everyone, which gives this
group read and filescan rights in the SYS:LOGIN directory.
. That's all! Just type fslogin now.
Stage Two.
. Copy the program fslogin.com to the local disk of the PC's
in your network. Make sure that this program resides in a
directory, that is in the PATH variable. From that moment
on, your users will be able to login, even if they have
logged out the last time from 'some' network drive, leaving
SYS:LOGIN on 'some' network drive letter, but the first.
Stage Three.
. Rename FSLOGIN.COM to LOGIN.COM in both the directories
SYS:LOGIN and SYS:PUBLIC. When Stage Two has been used,
also distribute LOGIN.COM to the PC's with a harddisk.
How to use
==========
Once installed, Full Screen Login is available. Just type
FSLOGIN and the Login Data menu shows up. As you can see the
name of the default server, to which the workstation is
attached is automatically placed in the Server field. For a
first exercise, fill in the name of an userid you want to use
and press the enter key. The highlight goes down to the
Password field. When there is a password defined for this
userid, fill it in and press enter again, otherwise leave this
field blank. When all datafields are oke, the highlight is on
the 'accept' button field. Press the enter key again to confirm
the complete form to the program.
At this moment the information that has been placed in the
fields will be validated, and when something is wrong, you
will be informed. When the validation is oke, and there are no
other accounting or security restrictions, the actual Novell
login.exe will be executed. You as a system supervisor, do not
have to change anything to existing login scripts in order to
use FSLOGIN.
When filling in the fields in the form, you might have noticed
that the Novell menu like interface expects you to acknowledge
both the data in the individual fields, as well as the form as a
whole. When entering data into a selected field (the field
with the highlight), the hardware cursor appears. When the
enter key is pressed to 'acknowledge' the data in this field,
the hardware cursor disappears and the highlight moves on to
the next field. When you want to edit the contents of a field,
without losing what is already there, move the highlight to
that field and press the Modify key (F3). There are some
alternate keys that can be used to move the highlight from one
field to anonther. Those keys are: tab, backtab, up arrow,
down arrow, home, end, page up and page down.
See the next chapter on how to further simplify the way you
can work with FSLOGIN.
Pre-filling the fields
======================
To make daily use even more simple, two of the three fields in
the Login Data form can be pre-filled. You might already have
noticed that the Server field contains the name of the server,
to which the PC is attached. This automatic filling in of a
servername should be sufficient in single server environments,
where there is nothing to choose. However, in a multiserver
environent the server to which the PC is attached is not
always the one users need access to. A DOS environment
variable can be used to specify a different name as the
default.
Type the following command at the DOS command prompt.
SET FS_SRV=MYSERVER
When the program is started again the Server field will
contain the string 'MYSERVER'.
Another feature available here is the ServerList function.
When the F5 key is pressed, the program reads the names of
available servers in the network and presents a list on the
screen. Just move the highlight and pick a name!
The Userid field can be pre-filled as well with the use of
another environment variable. Type the following command at
the DOS command prompt.
SET FS_UID=MYUSERID
Now the Userid field will also come up with a default. When
the pre-filled values for the Server and Userid are correct,
the only thing the user has to do is type the corresponding
password and press the enter key twice. Once to acknowledge
the contents of the password field and once to acknowledge the
form as a whole with the aid of the accept button.
There is a special form of the FS_UID variable, that can be
usefull when the userids in your organisation are highly
structured. There are companies that use not so individual
userids like ACCOUNT01, ACCOUNT02, ACCOUNT03 etc. And maybe
SALES01, SALES02 and so on. The crucks is that part of the
string always is the same. You can pre-fil this common part of
the userid by placing it in the environment variable FS_UID,
followed by a tilde. For example:
SET FS_UID=TECHNO~
Have a look at what happens!
When you are the supervisor, you probably type the string
'supervisor' a thousand times a year. See the next chapter why
you shouldn't!
Special Keys
============
F1=Help
You might already have used the F1 key for online help. Most
of the basics of this utility are explained here, and the
average user should have enough information to do the job. The
Arrow Up, Arrow Down, Page Up and Page Down let you scroll
through the text, and the Escape key brings you back again.
F3=Modify
This is in fact the default Novell menu function key for
modifying the contents of a field. I considered it useful to
mention this key on the 25'th line as a reminder.
F5=ServerList
When you are working in a multiserver environment, the
ServerList function becomes valuable. Just press this key, to
get an overview of all the file servers in your network, and
pick one. Note that using the F5 key is independent of the
currently highlighted field. It always works.
F7=Supervisor
There is one specific userid, which is probably typed
thousands of times each day by thousands of supervisors. Just
press the F7 key and look what happens. It does not matter on
which field the highlight is. After pasting the string
'supervisor' in the Userid field, the highlight goes straight
to the password field, since this is most likely the place you
want to go.
Password expired!
=================
Well, in that case, this is what you get!
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Password Expired Status ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ Your current password has expired. In order to be able to ║
║ login, you must specify a new one in the New Password field. ║
║ Retype the new password again after the Verification prompt. ║
║ This is a check to prevent typing errors. Your new password ║
║ should be at least 3 characters long. ║
║ ║
║ New Password ................................... ║
║ ║
║ Verification ................................... ║
║ ║
║ ┌──────┐ ║
║ │Accept│ ║
║ └──────┘ ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
This information guides the user to a new pasword.
I should mention a special case when the so called grace logins are
used. As you will probably know the grace login feature of Novell
allows the users to login with an old password, which is in fact
expired. You could even give a user an unlimited number of grace
login's, which would have about the same effect as giving a password
an unlimited time to use. I have investigated to implement the
handling of grace logins in my program as well, but was forced to
drop it. The simple and only reason for this is, that a user with
grace login possibilities, would be prompted a second time by the
Novell login.exe program. Since I have no control of what kind of
programs the Novell login.exe runs on behalf of the system login
script, I considered it 'unstable' to programmatically 'answer' this
extra prompt. Working on this item I found out that there is no
clean solution for this.
But that does not mean that you should throw away the grace login
options of the users. Grace logins are needed in order to be able to
change the password anyhow!
Some other features
===================
Full Screen Login has a screen dimmer that activates automatically
after five minutes of keyboard inactivity. A small red box travels
around on the screen (white, green or amber if you have a monochrome
video adapter). When a key is pressed the Login Data form shows up
again.
Full Screen Login has support for the optional parameters, that can
be passed to the system login script. There is no separate field for
this, but parameters can be typed in the Userid field after the name
of user. Leave one space between the name of the user and the
parameter. When the Userid field seems to be full, just type ahead
and see the text scroll. The combined length of the name of the user
and the optional parameters cannot exceed 64 bytes.
FSLOGIN does not only work full screen, but is also command line
compatible with the Novell login command. The fslogin.com program
does in fact pass the command line that is typed to the login.exe
program. The advantage of using FSLOGIN is that the SYS:LOGIN
directory will be searched for and set to the first network drive
letter. No more manual searching for drive 'x'.
FSLOGIN works with monochrome VGA monitors without manually setting
a specific video mode with the MODE command.
Since version 1.1. a RRS (Registration Reminder Screen) has been
added. This is the small window below the Login Data window, that
contains the text 'Unregistered Evaluation Copy'. When you register
you should specify a text string that you want to appear in this
window. This text string should contain company information like the
name of the company and perheaps the name of the department who does
the registration.
Some questions. And some answers.
=================================
Question 1:
When I want to use your program, do I have to throw away my existing
login scripts?
No you dont'. Full Screen Login does not replace the Novell
login.exe and corresponding login scripts. It adds full screen
support and extensive error and exception reporting, without
throwing away your already made effort.
Question 2:
Why is the FSLOGIN.COM the only program to copy to the SYS:PUBLIC
directory?
In order to conserve a bit of disk space, and make eventual updates
as easy as possible to install, there'a only one place for the
overlay and other support files, and that is the SYS:LOGIN
directory. The file FSLOGIN.COM is the only one to copy to the
public directory.
Question 3:
I just installed your product, but I receive the message:
'The FSLOGIN.OVL program could not be executed.'.
The most probable cause is, that you run the program fslogin.com
from a local hard disk, but the server you are attached to does not
have Full Screen Login installed. Use the netx option 'PS=MYSERVER'
to make the correct server the default, or better, install Full
Screen Login on the other servers as well.
Question 4:
I installed Full Screen Login, but when I want to use it I receive
the message:
'The LOGIN.EXE program could not be executed.'.
Did you rename the original Novell login.exe? If yes, rename it back
or make a copy of it.
Question 5:
I work in a large company with 257 file servers in a network. When I
use the ServerList function, there are only 255 file servers in the
list.
The current limitation of the ServerList function is 255 names. If
this realy is a problem, please contact me.
Question 6:
Your program does not support grace logins. What should I do with
the currently defined grace logins?
Dont't throw away the grace option for your users! When you disable
grace logins, there will be no way the user can change the password.
Not with my program, nor with any other login program. In fact Full
Screen Login needs some grace logins to remain, in order to be able
to change the password. It's also worth mentioning, that when a user
presses the escape key in the Password Expired Status form, the
number of Grace Logins Left will be decremented by one. In fact Full
Screen Login did do a login function call once to find out that the
password had expired.
Question 7:
During the installation, stage one, I have to add a trustee
assignment to the SYS:LOGIN directory for the group EVERYONE. Why is
this for NetWare 2.xx only?
Because NetWare 3.11 already gives EVERYONE access to the SYS:LOGIN
directory, even after login. NetWare 2.xx did 'hide' the SYS:LOGIN
directory after login.
Summary of changes between 1.0 and 1.1
======================================
The detection of monochrome displays connected to a VGA adapter
has been improved. There have been some cases of 'grey',almost
unreadable screens on some types of machines.
The user interaction has been enhanced by using an Accept button
field in the Login Data and the Password Expired forms. This makes
it more intuitive that the form as a whole must be acknowledges.
A RRS (Registration Reminder Screen) has been added.
This small window will contain the name of the company and/or
department for registered users.
An installation batch file has been added. Not that installation
has been difficult, but this will save some time and make an
eventual update easier to do.
The fslogin.com file has been optimized. So it's even smaller
then it was before. There are however no functional differences
between fslogin.com (1.0) and fslogin.com (1.1). The two versions
can be mixed.
The fslogin.ovl has been optimized as well. Despite the added
code for the accept button it is about 10 kb smaller.
Registration and support
========================
Feel free to use Full Screen Login for a trail period of 30 days.
After this period you are expected to register or stop using it. The
registration fee is based on a single file server licence. When used
on more servers, each server should have it's own licence.
Registration differs for the Netherlands, the United States and
other countries. When neither the Netherlands or the US apply to
you, you are expected to follow the US procedure, or contact Confirm
for another arrangement. See also the register.xx forms on the
distribution diskette or the archive file.
Registered users are offered free support for at least a period of
half a year. They will receive a diskette with their 'customized'
version of FSLOGIN, which contains the name of the company and/or
department.
Registered users will also receive updates for a period of at least
half a year when new versions become available.
My preference for support is using either Compuserve mail, Telefax
or Fidonet (in this order). It is my go to answer all questions
within a reasonable amount of time.
Compuserve : 76260,2363
Telefax : 31-8360-41580
Fidonet : 2:512/250.359
Phone : 31-8360-24988
The Netherlands.
----------------
Dutch users can register by paying DFL 200,00 Excluding 17.5% OB at
the Postbank account 2004075 of:
Confirm
Ardèchelaan 35
6904 NG ZEVENAAR
The Netherlands
The United States
-----------------
Users in the United States and other countries register by paying
US$ 125,00 at Visacard 4563 5303 9038 8376 of A.A. Slingerland.
Any comment, criticism or idea is welcome, as long as it is in a
constructive way.
Aad Slingerland
februari 1993
End Of Document