It’s the Little Things
Okay, so I’ve gotten a little deeper into the network and I’m finding more “little” things wrong. For one, the servers aren’t all on the same version of Directory Services. For those of you who aren’t Certified Netware Engineers, that’s a bad thing. NDS, or Netware Directory Services, is the distributed database of everything, including security, on the network. If all the servers don’t have the same revision of the NDS programs, called NLMs in Netware Land, there can be problems with security and access between servers. Enough of those problems and the network stops running. But, so far, that hasn’t been a real issue. So, I’m not too worried. I’m working on correcting the problem, but it can wait until the next “maintenance weekend” to reboot the servers so this will take effect.
The other “issue” that sticks out for me is a bad time synchronization plan. I don’t think that it got this way on purpose, but time synchronization is all wrong. Mainly, it looks like the last Netware Admin had no experience on Netware 4.x or greater. I won’t go into the details, but… Well, let’s just say it needs work. This is something that I can work on, and implement, without taking the servers down. I’ve started working on that, too. It’ll take a couple of days to get straight, but that will improve network performance quite a bit.
And, of course, there’s virtually no network documentation. Not a big surprise, if you have any experience with taking over a network. How many Network Engineers really want to write documentation? But, I know it needs to be done. And, I also know how good that looks to management. (Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m kissing butt already. *sigh*) Anyway, I need to go get my sleep so I can be early to the office and hard at work. Updates soon!
