Recently we were preparing to Down our server (Arcserve problems) and found that one user hadn't logged off so I went to log off the user. Meantime my colleague was locking out users from the server to prevent them logging back in. Whilst he was waiting for me the screensaver came on, and locked the server.

From that point on we could not unlock the server. We entered the correct username and password but two error messages came up, labelled -256 and -654. We were also logged in as administrator on one workstation. In the end we pulled the plug on the APC and the server is now working fine but why should the screensaver lock us out of the server.?

If by chance you did a diable login at the server console prompt, this would disable all logins to NDS.  In the sense, the Screen Save in 5.x references the NDS database to acquire the login to the server. Since logins were disabled, no worky.  This would be the most likely cause..

I can not think of any other reason as to why this would happen, future reference should be to disable the screen saver before disabling logins.

HTH

Mark C. Greenwood, CNE
m_jgreenwood@yahoo.com
 
CNE 4.11 and CNE 5 certified.  BS Degree in MIS.  Working in the industry for 8 years.  
I work with NT servers, NDS for NT as well.

Thanks for that, it confirms what we suspected. We will avoid that next time!