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Reaping the Benefits of Novell's NDS 8 November 1, 1999 By James E. Drews If you haven't yet done so, it's time to add directory to your buzzword vocabulary. And when you're talking about directories, you're probably talking about the leader of the pack: NDS. Novell has released version 8 of its directory services, and NDS users will reap the benefits of new features. Previous versions of NDS scale only so far--in our experience no more than 10,000 objects per context, maybe more if you keep a watchful eye on the system. Novell's own support group recommends that each NDS partition in the tree be limited to 2,500 or fewer objects. NDS can handle more objects per partition (our student partition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, CAE Center is hovering around 6,000 objects), but it doesn't operate as efficiently as it could. With NDS 8, Novell has addressed scalability. NDS 8 also provides performance boosts. For example, several object attributes are now indexed to speed access and searches. Further performance improvements come from server-side sorting of objects. This lets the client obtain a list of sorted objects without having to request all the objects and then sort them on the client. For contexts that contain hundreds of thousands of objects, this provides a genuine performance gain at the client. When we loaded a context with 40,000 user objects, the new ConsoleOne version, which ships with NDS 8, let us view the context after 30 seconds (a similar task took two-and-a-half minutes with NWAdmin). This revised ConsoleOne is unquestionably an improvement on the original that shipped with NetWare 5, with one exception: Just starting the Java-based ConsoleOne on a Pentium III 500-MHz machine takes several minutes, whereas the previous NWAdmin took a minute. The new ConsoleOne also lets administrators modify the NDS schema. If you add custom schema definitions, ConsoleOne will let you fill in those attributes as well. This is done from the "Other" tab when editing the object's properties (see screen below). NDS 8 fully supports the LDAP3 specification, including auxiliary class support, DNS naming, and support of UID as a naming attribute in NDS and circular containment. The circular containment allows OU (organizational unit) and organization objects to contain domains and not just other OUs.
Prepare for the Upgrade If the first server you upgrade to NDS 8 does not have a replica of the [root] partition, you need to perform a few schema changes. You will need to run DSREPAIR 6.31 or higher on a server that contains a replica of the [root] partition. After loading DSREPAIR, select Advanced Options->Global Schema Operations, Post NetWare 5 Schema Update. A tip from the Novell Cool Solutions Web site suggests running this update before doing the upgrade. The update to the schema adds several new definitions required by NDS 8, such as uniqueID. For a complete checklist of tasks to perform prior to the install, see "An NDS 8 Upgrade Checklist" at left.
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