NoRM Seems to be Missing Pieces

I ran into an oddity today looking at Novell Remote Manager (NoRM) on fairly fresh servers that we had migrated a for a customer.  It looks as though Novell Remote Manager isn't installed properly.  (Please forgive my bouncing between NoRM and the full name as I'm trying to help other people's searches out).

The symptom on an OES2 SP3 Linux box with eDirectory installed is that Novell Remote Manager shows only the "View File Locations" option, and none of the other normal NoRM components.  I looked at the other servers and same issue.  Until...I came to their GroupWise WebAccess server.

The straight SLES 11 server hosting GroupWise WebAccess wouldn't let me login as admin or any other eDirectory account.  Which is not unexpected as it doesn't have any instances of eDirectory installed.  I could login as root though, and when I did I had all of the normal NoRM options available.  Made me scratch my head and go "hmmmm".

I discovered that logging on as root on the OES boxes worked too, and low-and-behold, ALL of the NoRM options were there.  Logged out, back in as admin and ta-da, only got the "View File Locations" piece.  I started digging, and digging, and digging.

After several frustrated attempts to find a TID on Novell's KB, I finally worded it in a way that I happened upon TID #7009282 which didn't quite fit, but had me double checking if my admin was definitely LUM enabled.  Then just two spots away I found TID #7007338 which points to a NAM / LDAP issue and TID #3401691.  Big SMH on this one.  TID #3401691 is a nice short tutorial in troubleshooting LDAP.

My customer's servers have been migrated from physical NetWare boxes to virtual OES2/SLES boxes - along with all of the services.  We moved the replicas off of the NetWare boxes and onto the OES2 virtual servers.  Let me repeat that: we moved ALL OF THE SERVICES.  Guess which one I forgot to update?  Yep, forgot to change the Preferred LDAP server from the old NetWare box that we pointed to during configuration and installation into their existing tree.

A quick change of the IP number for the Preferred LDAP server in nam.conf and a restart of namcd did the trick.  Here's what I did to fix the problem (in case you're in the same boat and don't fell like visiting Novell's KB).

1. Open a terminal window
2. Do a tail on the messages file using:  tail /var/log/messages
• You're looking for errors related to LDAP, such as "LDAP bind failed" or "Unable to get LDAP handle"
3. Used vi to edit the conf file:  vi /etc/nam.conf
4. Changed the IP for the preferred_server
5. Saved the changes
6. Restarted namcd using: rcnamcd restart
7. And to be on the safe side I also ran: rcapache2 restart and rctomcat5 restart
8. Tested NoRM login on both the OES2 and SLES-only servers

If this helps anyone, I'm happy.  But for me, I'm tucking this into my virtual purse for future reference.

And in case you're wondering what searches I used here's the list:

The Winner:

• only root user can login to novell remote manager

Losers:

• novell remote manager is only showing view file information
• NoRM doesn't appear to be installed properly
• NoRM not showing all options
• novell remote manager not showing all options
• NoRM has only limited functionality
• novell remote manager limited options
• novell remote manager not fully installed