| The purpose of network troubleshooting is the timely restoration of essential services. Troubleshooting is part science, part art, and part pure luck. Many attempts have been made to reduce troubleshooting to a set of procedures and flowcharts; however, given the diversity of problems, no one has yet come up with a procedure or flowchart that covers every possible situation. The key to any successful troubleshooting is to develop the ability to break down a problem ("it doesn't work") into its elemental parts ("it works when I do this but doesn't when I do that"). This ability is the cumulation of personal experience and knowledge gained by exchanging war stories with others who have "been there, done that, and gotten the T-shirt." A combination of knowledge and experience (and some dumb luck doesn't hurt either) helps you to develop an efficient on-the-spot strategy to tackle each problem. You can apply this divide-and-conquer technique to troubleshooting eDirectory problems. REAL WORLD: The Troubleshooting Process A typical troubleshooting model consists of these five steps: - Gather information.
- Develop a plan of attack.
- Execute the plan.
- Evaluate the results; go back to step 1 if necessary.
- Document the solution.
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The material presented in this book focuses on the first three steps of the troubleshooting process: Gather information, develop a plan of attack, and execute the plan. In order to be able to break down an eDirectory error into its elemental parts, it is necessary to have an understanding of how eDirectory functions. Regardless of the nature and cause of an eDirectory issue, there are four rules you can follow to make your eDirectory troubleshooting efforts much easier. This chapter briefly outlines and explains each of the four rules. The rest of this book covers in detail the various information and tools that you need to troubleshoot and resolve eDirectory errors. Chapter 11, "Examples from the Real World," in particular, illustrates how you can use the knowledge presented in this book to solve a number of real-world eDirectory issues. TIP The four basics outlined here are not specific to troubleshooting eDirectory issues. You can easily modify them to resolve other problems, such as NetWare operating system ABENDs or a network communication problem.
A solid understanding and reasonable application of the following four eDirectory troubleshooting doctrines will assist you in quickly and efficiently identifying the cause of and restore any disruptions in your eDirectory tree: -
Don't panic. -
Understand the error codes and eDirectory processes. -
Troubleshoot and resolve the problem. -
Proactively manage eDirectory to prevent problems. NOTE eDirectory is the current name of the directory services ( DS ) product from Novell, Inc. In the past, the product was generally referred to as NDS (which stood for NetWare Directory Services, and later on, Novell Directory Services, when it was made available for operating system platforms other than NetWare). The concepts and much of the information presented in this book are applicable to both eDirectory and previous versions of NDS . However, some of the information (such as filtered replica) and tools (such as iManager) discussed in this book apply only with eDirectory. Where that is the case, every attempt is made to note this.
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