Well, I am actually going to knock something about Novell (OK, well I ding on everyone at some time). Where I work currently we have Novell NDS with multiple trees. NetWare 5.x and 6.x in a pure (well we are trying) IP environment. I have been here about 6 months so far. When I got here I found out that it was hard to get from tree to tree (amongst other things).
Well I started to look closer at the way that my workstation connects to the system. I had not spent much time recently with Novell at the higher end so had some additional learning to do to catch up. Well that is where the problem lies. If you are trying to discover the answer to a bug in the system Novell has a fairly large number of resources in the knowledge base. But if you are trying to find a good white paper or manual on the setup of things like SLP or DNS with Novell, good luck. What little is out there is very sparce. It is like putting a puzzle together with the pieces on different tables in the room.
The biggest thing I have found is that it is most important to have DNS setup correctly! You need to have DNS records for all the servers. You also need DNS records for the names of the trees that you have. These DNS records need to point to servers in the tree. I have setup our system so that the records for the treenames point to servers with replicas on them. You will want two or three DNS records for each tree pointing to multiple servers so that there is load balancing and fault tolerance. I am not sure if I got it the best but it is working MUCH better. I can now login to different trees simply by putting the tree name in the login screen. In the past I had to usually put in the IP address of one of the servers in the tree. The lookup and login is also much much faster too.
SLP is a totally different story. I think I am going to have to look at documentation in OpenSLP to try to really learn what is going on with SLP. I have made some adjustments to our system and it seems to be better. Initially we had SLP DA servers for each tree, so we could not get a good list of services available on the network. Even within a couple of trees we had multiple DA servers and different servers registered on different trees. Talk about messed up. Well we decided to go with two SLP DA servers and point all the other servers to those two servers. Low and behold we are now getting a complete list of servers. Works much better. I have the DA servers on NetWare 6 servers. I used the default scope. I should probably have setup a named scope and might have to change that.
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