Aero_Admin
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Environment Variable from Novell
Hi Experts!
I have a tough one I've been pulling my hair out over for the past few days. So a little background, we have some Novell 6.5 servers that we have been slowly migrating away from for the past year. We're nearing the end of the migration and we ran into an odd problem. When we turned off the Novell login script printing from our internal ERP program stopped functioning. This program was built in house, and was originally designed for Novell but over the years has been migrated to a Windows platform. Everything has been moved to Windows and has been functioning fine for weeks until we disabled the script. We played with the script and were able to isolate the problem to a single line that is responsible:
SET OS = "%OS"
Somehow printing is using this variable to execute the print command. The problem is this program is very old and difficult to troubleshoot and even worse to repair so we've been trying to replicate this command in windows but here is where the question comes in. Novell only seems to set this variable on a per session basis and if you don't use the Novell login script the variable defaults back to the original. (Original in Win7 is Windows_NT, after Novell script is WINNT) It's not changing the OS variable under Environmental variables or in any registry keys I can find so first question is where is this change being made? Second, is there a way to set an environmental variable for just a single session and not machine wide? We've found that if you use the SET command in a command prompt we can get the same result but it's only within that command prompt session, once you close the window and launch a new one the variable is gone. And we've played with SETX but you're only able to set user variables with that commad, not system variables.
Any help or insight you guys can provide would be appreciated!
Here are some extra details to help avoid some of the generic questions:
1) Workstations are Windows 7 Pro with all current updates
2) Novell server are Novell 6.5
3) Windows domain is all server 2003
Thanks!
I have a tough one I've been pulling my hair out over for the past few days. So a little background, we have some Novell 6.5 servers that we have been slowly migrating away from for the past year. We're nearing the end of the migration and we ran into an odd problem. When we turned off the Novell login script printing from our internal ERP program stopped functioning. This program was built in house, and was originally designed for Novell but over the years has been migrated to a Windows platform. Everything has been moved to Windows and has been functioning fine for weeks until we disabled the script. We played with the script and were able to isolate the problem to a single line that is responsible:
SET OS = "%OS"
Somehow printing is using this variable to execute the print command. The problem is this program is very old and difficult to troubleshoot and even worse to repair so we've been trying to replicate this command in windows but here is where the question comes in. Novell only seems to set this variable on a per session basis and if you don't use the Novell login script the variable defaults back to the original. (Original in Win7 is Windows_NT, after Novell script is WINNT) It's not changing the OS variable under Environmental variables or in any registry keys I can find so first question is where is this change being made? Second, is there a way to set an environmental variable for just a single session and not machine wide? We've found that if you use the SET command in a command prompt we can get the same result but it's only within that command prompt session, once you close the window and launch a new one the variable is gone. And we've played with SETX but you're only able to set user variables with that commad, not system variables.
Any help or insight you guys can provide would be appreciated!
Here are some extra details to help avoid some of the generic questions:
1) Workstations are Windows 7 Pro with all current updates
2) Novell server are Novell 6.5
3) Windows domain is all server 2003
Thanks!
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The environment variable OS has been Windows_NT since windows NT; i cannot imagine any program using that variable to determine the os version;
Besides, when you change the environment variable "OS" systemwide from a startup or login script that will basically have the same impact as changing it through the registry.
Could you try to test setting the OS variable through the startup script?
Besides, when you change the environment variable "OS" systemwide from a startup or login script that will basically have the same impact as changing it through the registry.
Could you try to test setting the OS variable through the startup script?
ASKER
We went along the same lines as your solution. We found that we could create a user variable for the OS that was being read over the system variable. This way the system variable stays intact and unchanged while the user variable gives us the result we needed. Thanks for your help!!
ASKER
We have found in our testing that changing that key does correct the problem but like I said, I'm weary of changing it just due to unforseen consequences. Does anybody know if changing it would cause any problems?
Thanks