Pass Through Auth Not Using Novell eDirectory Over RDP - Virtual Desktop

Question

Hi,
I have installed and configured SGD and the Virtual Desktop Adapter to a Virtual Center server. So far that whole side of things is working great. Machines are cloned, prepped and connected to by users through the My Desktop link in SGD. Now that I am attempting to perfect the master template I have encountered some issues. The network here is Novell eDirectory and at the moment when the desktop is launched the username and password used to authenticate to the SGD webtop are passed through to the Virtual Machine, but it seems that they are passed through to the Windows Authentication System/GINA even though the Novell client is in place.
The virtual machines are Windows XP and by default none of the user accounts exist locally, so of course the login fails. This drops the user back to the login box where it can be seen that the Workstation Only tick box is checked. Settings in the Novell client to always default to eDirectory authentication, forget last setting used etc has all been set properly. Even when hiding the Workstation Only tickbox the username and password are passed to local system authentication still.
I need to get the username and password sent to the Novell eDirectory authentication system/GINA in order for Zenworks to create the user on the local system. When dropping back to the login box and manually unticking the Workstation Only box login proceeds normally. Drives are mapped and the local user account is created by the Zenworks agent.
Is SGD specifically targeting an authentication subsystem within the virtual machine, regardless of your installed authentication handler/GINA preference order? Can I get SGD to pass the details to the Novell client? Barring that is there some way I can prevent SGD passing the details? I tried turning off some of the authentication details caching etc but some of that is needed to rename the virtual machines after the user connecting. For the time being having users authenticate twice would be acceptable, having them login in, then get an error message, then manually unticking Workstation Only then relogging in is not acceptable.
I have been searching these forums, Novell forums, Terminal Server forums for answers but so far nothing has been of any help. Please note that the login box is not the cut down/windows only login box that users are seen when they connect over RDP to a machine that already has a user logged in locally. There is no user logged in locally and the full login box is presented once the login failed message is cleared.
Any help, or even a nudge in the right direction would be great.
Thanks
Russ

Answer 1

Hi,
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I tried the full context user name path as well, but its defiantly just being passed to a different GINA. The only credentials that determine if you have RDP access to a server is the local machines credentials, so Microsoft have the service pass authentication straight to the Microsoft GINA non-interactively instead of honouring the installed GINA's. So it will fail no matter what I put in since the account doesn't exist locally yet. People have implemented solutions that depend on Active Directory domains, but that's what I am trying to avoid.
In that situation the AD Domain would allow access to the local machine based on Windows permissions, and a registry setting TSAutoLogin or something would trigger the Novell log in in parallel to map the Netware shared volumes. With no domain you can't get the initial log in triggered for the Novell client to kick in.
Connecting to the virtual machine using an RDP client without pre-entering authentication information does show the Novell Login (NWGINA) with all the right settings in place, so I have modified the expect (login) script for SGD not to automatically pass log in information through with the RDP connection it makes. The result is a clean Novell login box without any errors that a user can just enter their details into a second time.
Russ