Chapter 4. Don't Panic In the world of networking and when dealing with critical problems, the absolutely worst thing you can do is panic. This is especially true when you're working with eDirectory. In traditional network troubleshooting, changes that are made are typically easy to undo. For example, if you are working on a routing problem, you can change a setting in the router that disables packet forwarding on a particular interface and observe the change in the environment; if the change does not affect the problem the way you thought it would, you can (easily) change the setting back. However, when you're working with eDirectory, certain changes are easy to make but are extremely difficult to undo. As you will read in later chapters, it takes a thorough understanding of how eDirectory works combined with a full understanding of what the problem actually is to determine a proper course of corrective action. It is not uncommon for a network administrator to run into a situation that demands immediate attention. Critical eDirectory problems tend to have fairly high visibility ”either because the problem affects users' ability to log in and do the work that makes the company run or because a major piece of network functionality is affected. For example, printing might be offline. Users may be able to work on documents but unable to print out the sales reports that upper management needs to see every day by 10:00 a.m. In this sort of high-visibility (not to mention high-stress) environment, it is very easy to fall into the trap of doing something for the sake of just doing something. Compounding this, upper management often does not understand the intricacies of what makes the network tick, but they certainly can identify when the person who is responsible for fixing the problem is not doing anything about it. Or so they believe. Doing something for the sake of doing something is almost always counterproductive. It is easy to make a change at the server and then when upper management wants to know what you are doing about the problem, you can say "I changed this, this, and this." This is an easy out but can actually make the problem resolution process take much longer because of new factors introduced to the problem that have actually made the situation worse . This book is about the technical aspects of working with and fixing eDirectory problems, but we want to diverge for a second and talk about how to deal with the difficult situation of working with people and stress. If not handled properly, they can have a very negative impact on your ability to deal with the eDirectory problems effectively. | 