Trustee DB Export (beta)

Contents of README:

– “What does it do?” – This utility parses the .trustee_database.xml that you submit, and generates an output that contains all you need to create a script to re-import all those assignments. This is helpful if you have an NCP-only (non-NSS) volume and are basically left out in the cold as far as having utilities available to you for backup/export/migration of trustee assignments. Oh sure, if you have NSS, you have a whole shed full of tools, but if you don’t have NSS, you just get “ncpcon”. And I’m glad for that, but there was no automation tool… …until now…

– “What is beta?” – It means that you are lucky if it works. Actually it seems to work quite well with a few known oddities… So I guess beta really means that I make no promises…

– “NCP or NSS?” – It works with both NSS/NCP volumes *and* NCP-only (non-nss) volumes, because NSS trustee assignments can go through ncpcon too. By “NCP-only”, I mean a volume that was created on top of a standard Linux filesystem, like ext3 or Reiser.

– “Result output text-wrap?” – Be careful to notice if the result lines wrap around in the html text! If they are wrapped, they *might* not paste into your script as one line, and in that case the individual command will fail.

– “Case sensitive?” – The volume name you enter is not case-sensitive. Even though this is Linux-related, the NCP engine that we are calling does not care about the case. Just make sure there is no colon after the name!

– “Privacy?” – This utility does not store your trustee database file anywhere except in memory for the duration of the execution. Seriously, I don’t want your trustees file, and I don’t want someone else to get it either. I can’t really prove it to you, so you’ll have to take my word for it. If you don’t want to take my word for it, don’t use the utility. And I’m not sure anyone really cares if cn=sue.ou=marketing.o=corp has RF to USERS:tom… oh wait, that *does* sound kinda juicy….

– “Utility won’t work?” – If get errors, or your .trustee_database.xml is too large, or you just don’t want to use the web interface for any reason, contact me and send the file to me and I’ll convert it off-line. By the way, with some errors, you’ll get a message output (like bad filename), and with others you get re-directed to the base cgi script (like file too big)… Beta, folks…

– “Script won’t work?” – If you pasted the output results into a script and your script won’t execute, remember that you need to change the Linux file type to executable (chmod +x scriptname), and to run it, you need to give it the path to where it is (try ./scriptname).

– “Why did you make this utility?” – For the whole sordid story, and why you might want to use it to save yourself, see this blog post: http://yourlinuxguy.com/?p=75

– “Where is my Trustee DB?” – The trustee db can be found at /yourVolumeRoot/._NETWARE/.trustee_database.xml. If your volume is NCP-only (non-NSS), then yourVolumeRoot is whatever you set it to (like /vol2). If your volume is NSS, then yourVolumeRoot is likely /media/nss/volumeName.

– “How do I get the trustee db from my server?” – Well, that’s up to you. There are myriad ways. You could even access my blog and this utility right from your server console, though I encourage you to have a copy of your trustee db offline anyway, and you could use that.