Introduction
In 1993 Novell became the first company to integrate directory services—NetWare Directory Services (NDS), later renamed Novell Directory Services because of its cross-platform support, and now known as eDirectory—with its NetWare server operating system. Since then, NDS has been ported to the major enterprise server platforms, and today eDirectory remains a dominant leader as a general-purpose enterprise directory in the LAN market, deployed worldwide in 80% of Fortune 500 companies, such as CNN, Yahoo!, and Lufthansa Airlines.
Novell eDirectory is a multiple-platform, distributed database that stores information about the hardware and software resources available on your network. It provides network users, administrators, and application developers seamless, global access to all network resources. eDirectory also provides a flexible directory database schema, unmatched network security, and a consistent cross-platform development environment.
eDirectory uses objects to represent all network resources and maintains them in a hierarchical directory tree. By pointing, clicking, and dragging, you can make changes to directory trees without downing network servers. You can easily manage multiple trees, maintain and repair the networkwide directory from a client workstation, and automatically update distributed eDirectory replicas on all supported operating system platforms, including NetWare, Windows, Solaris, Linux, AIX, and HP/UX.
NDS/eDirectory is the core of NetWare-based networks and is also widely used in Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory implementations for identity management on both NetWare and non-NetWare server platforms. No matter what your purpose is, if you implement NDS/eDirectory in your networking environment, you need to have a firm handle on how it works and know what actions to take in the event of a problem. What’s more, good network administrators take proactive actions to prevent trouble from developing in the first place. This book is a comprehensive troubleshooting guide for Novell eDirectory.
You’ll find this book to be a rich and definitive source of information for eDirectory troubleshooting methodologies. No matter the size of your NDS tree, you’ll find this book to be indispensable. Topics covered in this book range from the fundamentals of Novell eDirectory and its new features, to troubleshooting, to proactively managing the internal operations of eDirectory. The information presented in this book will help you maintain and troubleshoot all aspects of Novell eDirectory.
This book is written for all LAN administrators, system administrators, consultants, resellers, and any others who design, implement, and support NDS/eDirectory networks.
Using this book, you will learn basic to complex concepts and techniques for diagnosing and repairing eDirectory problems. Whether your interest lies solely in understanding how NDS background processes function or in knowing how to deal with specific NDS problems, this book is the definitive source. All versions of NDS, up to and including eDirectory 8.7.3 (which is the latest at the time of this writing), are covered.
This book is organized into four logical parts:
Part I, “eDirectory Fundamentals,” includes an overview of Novell eDirectory basics, such as objects, partitions, and time synchronization. Part I also provides a comprehensive look at Novell Directory Services classes and how these classes are used to build objects in the directory tree. Having an understanding of NDS objects is a prerequisite to utilizing the full potential of NDS/eDirectory and the information in the rest of this book.
Part II, “Understanding the Error Codes and eDirectory Processes,” describes in great details the internal operations of eDirectory and associated error codes.
Part III, “Troubleshooting and Resolving Problems,” provides a thorough discussion of troubleshooting Novell eDirectory using various tools and utilities included with NetWare/eDirectory and available from third-party vendors. This part covers how to use the DSRepair, DSTrace, NDS iMonitor, and other utilities during troubleshooting operations.
In addition, this part covers NDS/eDirectory data recovery procedures and techniques, including the combination of various tools to diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve problems. This section concludes by applying the tools and techniques discussed to real-world examples.
Part IV, “Managing eDirectory to Prevent Problems,” rounds out the many day-to-day aspects of NDS that you need to know about in order to proactively prevent problems. Topics include eDirectory health checking, performance tuning, and providing a comprehensive eDirectory security plan for your network. By proactively managing your NDS tree, you can prevent many problems; this part shows you how.
The four appendixes in this book include valuable information that you can use as a handy reference:
Appendix A, “eDirectory Error Codes,” provides an exhaustive listing of all the NDS/eDirectory error codes and their explanations. This list of error codes helps you identify problems and determine resolution steps.
Appendix B, “DS Verbs,” provides information on the NDS verbs used by DSTrace.
Appendix C, “eDirectory Classes, Objects, and Attributes,” contains eDirectory schema information on all the object classes and attribute definitions found in eDirectory 8.7.3.
Appendix D, “eDirectory Resources,” lists resources used during the development of this book—third-party software products, good NDS resources found on the Internet, and other publications that cover related subject matter.
All the information and techniques presented in this book have been gathered from hands-on, real-world experiences learned from working with customers from around the world. Being SysOps for the Novell Product Support Forums (http://support.novell.com/forums) and Novell Developer Support Forums (http://developer.novell.com/ndk/devforums.htm) exposed us to a wide range of NDS/eDirectory implementations and issues. In this book, we share with you a selected number of the most frequently encountered DS problems and steps toward troubleshooting and fixing them.