using ice to export / import applications

thanks for your quick reply ShineOn.
why ? let say for historical reasons, but, unfortunately i can't change this. anyway, do you have a solution ?

"IMO you're not a real admin if you don't own John's suite of utilities"
IMO a good network/OS should provide efficient command line tools free of charge. Unfortunately Novell command line tools are buggy or unmaintained.
I have found something related to ice in novell support and will test it soon (http://support.novell.com/cgi-bin/search/searchtid.cgi?10094434.htm)
however, thank you for your suggestions ShineOn and floyd99.

I agree.  But, we all know that's not the case.  ICE is excellent, I use it extensively.
Trust me though,  JRB Utils is one of the best investments you'll ever make.. his software is cheap, his support is awesome (if you need a change to a program, he's always happy to tweak the code).  I can't recommend it enough.

"IMO a good network/OS should provide efficient command line tools free of charge. Unfortunately Novell command line tools are buggy or unmaintained."

That's a bizarre comment.  Usually, folx complain about having to >use< command-line tools, 'cause they needs tha pointin' an' tha clickin'..  I'd never heard anyone complain about any of the NetWare command line tools being buggy or unmaintained before now, either.

You get more for free from Novell than any other closed-source OS, besides, so the "free of charge" thing seems a bit off to me...

Now that NetWare can use the BASH shell, there are even more command-line tools.  

Good luck with the ICE thing.  Let us know how it goes.

ShineOn, ICE is probably not a good example, but you probably know the RIGHTS command which only works with 8.3 file names, stop randomly when you have non ASCII characters or when the directory is more than three level deep. Don't you think Novell don't have developpers to correct this ?
Additionnally if you have many servers (> 100) all over the world (sometimes with slow lines), 'point and click' tools are not a valid option, you can't even have logs of what have been done.
bash and other command line are only available on server side and only on newer versions of netware, if you don't have access to the console you're stuck.
On other closed source OS, you get xcacls, ldifde, csvde without having to convince managment to purchase jrbsoftware tools for each site.  
I am not microsoft fan, but i think that Novell have missed something, they should have bought jrbsoftware or developped equivalent tools. Let's hope that with Ximian and Suse guys they will be smarter ;-)

The RIGHTS.EXE DOS command-line command is deprecated.  It is for NetWare 3.x and NetWare 4.x.  Its last version was, I believe, 4.22.  being a DOS command, it does not understand long file names.  Deprecated means it's no longer supported or maintained, and you use it at your own risk.  Guess what - GRANT.EXE and REVOKE.EXE are deprecated, too.  (for the casual reader, they're Bindery command-line utilities)

If you're trying to use the RIGHTS command in modern NetWare, the problem isn't the tool, it's the user.  You should be assigning filesystem rights via eDirectory tools anyway.  Since almost any eDirectory object in a NetWare network can be a filesystem principal and filesystem rights can be inherited many ways, it is too complex a task for the command line, and it was right to drop "RIGHTS.EXE" from the repertoire.   The resource-kit command you cite for Windoze is OK for Windoze rights, 'cause it's all static inheritance ACL-based stuff and very simplistic to begin with, not dynamic like NWFS/NSS trustee rights.

If you must do that kind of thing via a command-line-style function, the closest thing would be trustee.nlm, on the server.  If you're stuck in the command-line-centric mindset, a Windoze command-prompt utility called TRUSTEES.EXE had been written by some admin somewhere and was available for free  download from the Novell coolsolutions site, but guess what!  The latest revision (trustees5) has a GUI!  http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/14128.html.  Even the hardcore NetWare geeks that write their own tools want the pointin' and clickin.'

Bulk loading of certain trustee rights may be a valid endeavor, but you could probably do what you need using trustee.nlm.

The csvde and ldifde Windoze RK commands are more closely related to ICE, I suppose, but as you say, that's probably not a good example of buggy, unmaintained utilities... 'specially since it's not a deprecated 16-bit MS-DOS command...

"You should be assigning filesystem rights via eDirectory tools anyway"
no, thanks. An outdated, bugged command line tool is always far better than a gui when you have mass updates to do.

"it is too complex a task for the command line"
when you want you can : http://www.jrbsoftware.com/06utils/utils5.htm#Settrust
it's a shame that Novell can't do something like this.

"The resource-kit command you cite for Windoze is OK for Windoze rights, 'cause it's all static inheritance ACL-based stuff and very simplistic to begin with, not dynamic like NWFS/NSS trustee rights."
probably, but it works, and you don't have to search additionnal tools to do the job.

"The latest revision (trustees5) has a GUI!"
i have already tested, il has taken ages to display the available trees, i stopped five minutes later.

"Even the hardcore NetWare geeks that write their own tools want the pointin' and clickin.'"
hope they won't be deceived with Novell dropping their DR-DOS system to switch to linux ;-)

I totally agree with psadac.
For instance, the other day I needed to expire about a few hundred staff accounts.  This involved moving them into an 'expired' OU,  setting their accounts to disabled, setting their groupwise accounts to disabled, and removing them from all groupwise distribution lists.

Using a few different JRB command line tools, I did this whole task in literally 10 minutes. This included extracting a list of all the staff that I needed to expire in the first place (based on last login time and a few other things), and then doing it.

Can you imagine how long it would have taken using Console One? i'd still be here a week later, quite literally.

It's soon time for me to delete all of last year's student accounts who are no longer studying. That will be somewhere in the order of 20,000 accounts.   This task doesn't daunt me at all.. including figuring out which accounts to delete and then making it happen (including their home directories I might add), will be less than a day's work.

Sorry, anyone who says GUI based stuff is the way to go clearly doesn't maintain a large user base, or if they do, they never need to perform mass updates/changes to more than 10 accounts at a time.   Anything GUI  based, that has to read a container with 30,000 objects in it, just has a coronary.

Of course, then think about all the things we schedule overnight or at various points during the day.  The way I import new student accounts 3 times a day from the enrollment system is via an extensive collection of batch files using ICE and JRB utils.  How I would have done this without those command line utils I have no idea.

I agree - Novell should provide tools to do this stuff.  But they don't, and I guess that's why John is still in business and still developing.. and I'm still very much willing to keep paying him every year for it.    In fact, i believe he's writing a version of his tools for the linux and windows environments now!

Just my 2c. ;)