| The specific strategies used for managing eDirectory may vary from environment to environment; however, any strategy for good management is based on three principles: -
Planning ahead -
Saving time -
Knowing your tools Planning Ahead Planning ahead can be a difficult task for many administrators ”partly because most work reactively rather than proactively. When reacting to situations on a continual basis, you have a constant drain on your time. This drain results in not spending the time to figure out a better way of doing things. Reacting to different situations on a constant basis also frequently results in having to spend time figuring out how to do the same task each time you do it because you cannot remember how you did it the last time, which may have been six months ago. A good way to start planning ahead is to spend a little extra time documenting solutions to problems as you go along. Finding the time for documentation is not always an easy task when you're moving from crisis to crisis. Remind yourself ”and your management ”that documenting your solutions ultimately saves you time and saves the company money. NOTE Many companies have policies that any network disruption that lasts more than a specified time (often 30 minutes) needs to have the "lesson learned" ”the cause, resolution, and recommendation on how the same issue may be prevented in the future ”documented and shared with affected company divisions.
Start small when documenting solutions: Take some notes along the way and refer back to them. When dealing with problems, one of the most critical phases of evaluating the solution is reviewing the situation and what happened between the time the problem was discovered and the time it was resolved. TIP It is often difficult during a crisis to find the time for taking good, detailed, notes that can be used for documentation at a later time. You might find it more convenient to voice-record your thoughts, observations, and actions with a tape recorder and transcribe them later.
Documenting changes as they are made is also a good way to save time during the troubleshooting process. By having a record of recent changes made, you may stand a better chance of solving the problem quickly. By documenting changes, you can also start to lay down a framework for standard ways of doing things. Having standards is a good way to meet the second strategy for managing eDirectory: saving time. Saving Time By spending a little extra time looking at how certain repetitive tasks are done, you might find ways to reduce the amount of time spent doing them. By shaving a little bit of time off each iteration, you can make yourself more productive ”and in many environments, being productive is a key to promotion or to working on other projects. Let's take a simple example: starting ConsoleOne. On a 2GHz Celeron-based machine running Windows 2000, when launched locally on the workstation ConsoleOne takes about 45 seconds to start, depending on the number of snap-ins to be loaded and the other applications running on the system. If you need to add a user to a group , that operation can take a minute or two ”significantly more time than the startup of the utility. TIP Whenever possible, install a copy of your frequently used administration tools, such as ConsoleOne and NetWare Administrator, locally on your workstation. With the popularity of USB flash drives , you can easily put a copy of your favorite tools (including ConsoleOne, NetWare Administrator, and so on) on one and keep it handy on your key chain.
If you shut down ConsoleOne and have to restart it later to perform another administrative task, you face another repeat of the startup delay. While 45 seconds may not seem like much, it adds up quickly. If you start ConsoleOne an average of 10 times a day, that's over 35 minutes' worth of your time just waiting for the utility to start up over the course of a week. That may not seem like much at first, but if you can find a number of places where you can make small changes, the time adds up. Reducing the time you spend performing repetitive ”and frequently boring ”tasks gives you time to work on projects you want to be working on. TIP You may be tempted to leave ConsoleOne running at all times in order to save on its launch time. However, there have been some memory leak issues (depending on the versions of ConsoleOne and the workstation's Java Runtime Environment [JRE]) that can result in degraded performance as time progresses. Instead, it can often be more productive to "save up" a number of changes and do them together. Some companies have polices that certain types of changes (such as updating the employee phone numbers stored in directory services [ DS ]) are done once a week, on a Monday morning, for instance.
Coming up with standard ways of doing tasks also makes it possible to train others to do repetitive tasks. If you are a programmer, knowing when you can save time by writing a program ”as opposed to using standard tools to complete the task at hand ”is important. If you know your programming skills can make shorter work of a repetitive task, spend a little extra time writing the program. Using automated tools ”even home-grown tools ”can help ensure consistency in how tasks are performed and make your network easier to administer. Knowing Your Tools There is nothing worse for a new administrator than the overwhelming task of learning how to effectively use all the tools available. To know when to use ICE instead of ConsoleOne, for example, you need to know the features of both utilities and be able to ascertain when one utility is better than the other. You should spend time with the different utilities to learn the strengths and weaknesses of each one. What works for you may not work for someone else, but knowledge always works to your advantage, particularly when you're trying to save time. You should look at older tools if they are available. Novell does not provide the DOS-based NETADMIN utility with NetWare 5 and higher, but a NetWare 4.x server on your network would have a copy of it. NETADMIN has its own features that can prove useful in making lots of changes when ICE or UImport cannot be easily applied (for example, when you're updating console operators on multiple servers or making a quick change to a login script). One limitation of NETADMIN to be aware of is that it does not support extended schema classes and attributes, not to mention some of the newer classes introduced in NetWare 5 and higher, and it definitely does not support auxiliary classes. You should also spend time with third-party tools. If your company spends money on a management tool, the best return it can get on the investment is realized only if the tool is used effectively. If possible, you should reuse parts of tools. For example, Chapter 13, "eDirectory Health Checks," talks about the product bv-Control for NDS eDirectory from BindView Corporation. bv-Control is an extremely powerful tool, but using it fully involves reusing reports that you have created or that are part of the standard reports included with the product. Not having to re-create reports that already exist ”or modifying existing reports that almost contain the information you need ”saves you time. The only way you can do this, though, is by knowing what comes with the product and organizing your reports so you can find them for reuse later. Similarly, if you create a data file for a mass user modification with ICE or UImport, you should save the control and data files as well as the tools and scripts you used to create the data files. You never know when they might come in handy ”particularly in a disaster-recovery situation. Knowing your tools also involves knowing shortcuts for certain functions. For instance, when using NetWare Administrator, why would you use the mouse to open the Object menu and select Move when you could simply select the object and press the F7 key to accomplish the same task more quickly? Train yourself to use the shortcut keystrokes instead of using the mouse. A Secret Fourth Strategy: Multitasking No, we are not talking about the capabilities in your operating system of choice to run more than one program, although we are talking conceptually of a similar way of doing things. Desktop operating systems typically do not do true multitasking; they do what is called task switching . Task switching between multiple computers is what you need to do as an administrator. Task switching is particularly effective if you use a tool such as bv-Control that can tie up a machine for a significant amount of time (hours to days sometimes, when you're generating complex reports). Having a separate machine to perform tasks like this can save you time and enable you to work on multiple tasks. Many administrators benefit from having more than one computer at their disposal. It takes some time to get used to the idea of working on more than one project at a time, and it takes a bit of practice to keep from getting lost. If you can master the skill of task switching, though, you'll find your job a whole lot easier. TIP You will find having access to multiple systems, placed side-by-side, very handy during DS partitioning and replication operations. For instance, you can have DSTrace displaying the replica synchronization status on one system; another workstation running some network management software showing you the status of servers, available disk space, and network utilization; and a third machine running ConsoleOne to issue the partitioning and replication commands.
| 