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Login scripts using Kixtart


One of the things former Novell network administrators miss when they migrate to
NT servers is the ability to run login scripts of the sort that Netware makes a-
vailable. The original design philosophy behind NT server envisaged that login
scripts would be dispensed with altogether (roaming profiles and system policies
were supposed to do the same job in a different way).

NT servers (and Samba emulating NT under Linux) are capable of transferring to
each client that logs in a batch file to be run on the local machine as part of
the login process, but that in itself is not enough to achieve Novell-style func-
tionality, because the things that a DOS-style batch file can do when running
under Win 9x on a client are extremely limited. (The command line interpreters
of NT4 workstation and NT 2K Professional are slightly more powerful, and such
clients can in any case run any valid WIN32 executable file as a "login script",
but this is of little use on networks that have to serve the needs of Win9x
machines). This gap has been admirably filled by the Kixtart system, originally
developed within Microsoft Belgium and shipped as an unsupported supplement with
the Resource Kits for NT server. Though not an open source product, the binaries
are freely available for download and use on Microsoft clients without additional
license fee from http://www.kixtart.org/ a site which offers many example scripts,
FAQ's and other support materials. The program is regularly updated to maintain
compatability with newer versions of Miscrosoft servers and clients.

Kixtart works very well indeed alongside roaming profiles and system policies to
give the administrator of a Samba-based network extensive and flexible control
over the configuration of machines and the facilities available to users. A Kix-
tart script delivered from the server but running on the workstation can do vir-
tually anything the administrator wished to have done at login time, except that
under Win9x nothing in any login script can change settings in the current user's
registry, because this registry is initialised after the login script has run
(more about this, and the crucial difference it makes between Win9x and NT client
login procedures, can be found on the profiles and policies page).

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