Account Management in Mixed Environment

[jessbryant]

Hi. This is going to sound very newb'ish, but I need some help with our account management scenario. Here's what we currently have going on in our department. I work in a fairly large department in a hospital. Our department manages it's own servers, as we have specific needs that require us to manage our own login scripts, etc. We have three Netware 6 servers and three Windows 2003 (non-domain) servers. Now here's where the fun begins. Our workstations need to login to the hospital's domain in order to receive software updates and other security related issues. We don't use the hospital's servers for anything other than authentication into the domain. So the way we currently work is they login to the netware Tree and then into the hospital's domain. If a particular user needs to login to one of our windows servers, they have a net use command in their novell login script. As you can see, all users have at *least* two accounts, and some users have three accounts (if they need to login to the windows servers).

We are currently looking into consolidating the netware servers and one of our windows servers. The hospital is trying to get us to move away from Novell, and just have us build a Windows server and join it to their domain. However, they won't give our department control over managing the login scripts and ACLs. So we are resisting this. We would like to keep Novell around for account management, but we need to find a better way to manage our accounts. Here's the newb part of this question...is there a way to use a person's AD account/pw to authenticate into the novell and non-domain windows servers?

I apologize for the lengthiness of this post. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated!