NetWare 6 Advanced Audit Service

NetWare 6 contains a lot of new functionality that enhances security. For auditing, the utility is called Novell Advanced Audit Service (NAAS). It is a little more complicated to set up NetWare 6 for auditing than Windows or Unix machines, but the utility can catch a lot of events and works with the eDirectory.

An agent is used to collect data on an object, such as a server, and a management NAAS server receives this information from agents on the network. The configuration for each NAAS agent , as well as the NAAS servers, is stored in the eDirectory. Both the agent and the management server software can be configured by using Console One.

You can also set up NAAS to send email alerts to specified users. Edit the file SYS:\AUDIT\MAILALERT. CFG , and place the name of the SMTP server (outgoing mail server) on the first line, and a list of email addresses on the next line. For multiple email addresses, separate with a space or comma.

NAAS allows you to use Oracle or the Persuasive database that comes as part of NetWare 6.x to store the audit data collected.

Finally, you can configure audit agents for many older NetWare components, such as the various file systems and the eDirectory itself. Creating audit policies and associating them with objects in the eDirectory can be a complex task, due to the many components for which you can audit, as well as the support for older products.

Still, if you are using, or about to migrate to, NetWare 6, you should become intimately familiar with the new auditing feature. You can read the documentation for NAAS at the URL www.novell.com/documentation/lg/nw6p/index.html, and from the list presented select Novell Advanced Audit Service.