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NetPro's DS Expert: Is Your NDS Tree Healthy?

By James E. Drews Whether you've just started or recently completed your transition to NetWare 4, one nagging question may still remain in your mind: Is my NDS tree healthy? While Novell has done a fair job bullet-proofing its DS.NLM, it's still not perfect. Network failures and packet corruption may continue to cause problems because most users have not turned on the NDS packet checksums. Even with checking for packet corruption, NDS is still not guaranteed to be problem-free. So, how do you know if your tree is healthy?

One way involves using Novell's tools to check each partition and server manually. But this can amount to one big hassle. NetPro Computing's DS Expert network monitoring software offers an alternative. I looked at its beta version 2.2 in Network Computing's University of Wisconsin lab and determined that it's definitely a fine tool for monitoring and diagnosing NDS problems both for novices and expert administrators. This product lets you view multiple aspects of the NDS tree from one simple, easy-to-use program, and its extensive documentation on NDS errors is a true benefit.

Has Three Branches DS Expert consists of three parts: The DXMON.NLM, DXAGENT.NLM and DSEXPERT. EXE. The DXMON.NLM program oversees and accumulates information on the NDS tree. DXAGENT.NLM builds on DXMON.NLM's capabilities by monitoring in greater detail and reporting the information to the Tree Monitor. The third component, DSEXPERT, which runs on Windows, views information gathered by NLMs (NetWare Loadable Modules).

Once DS Expert is installed and running, it uncovers all NDS replicas and servers in the tree and starts looking for problems. One of version 2.2's new features is the ability to install the software from an NT workstation, which is something (hopefully) that most vendors are working on. I successfully installed DS Expert from an NT workstation onto our College of Engineering's NDS tree. DS Expert began searching our NDS tree for problems, and it soon zeroed in on some with a couple of our NDS replicas.

To use DS Expert to the fullest, the DXAGENT.NLM must run on every server in the tree. Without this NLM running, reported information is limited. Without DXAGENT running on a server, DS Expert can't determine if the server is completing its synchronization process with the other servers. Information is confined to the replicas and type stored on the server, as well as what NDS state they are in.

DS Expert presents information in two views: Partition List view and Server List view. By looking at our tree in the Partition List view, I found that I had a few replicas with only a Master partition and one read/write replica. Novell recommends having three copies of any partition. DS Expert flagged these partitions in red, indicating an error.

One of DS Expert's more interesting features is Multi-Server Trace. Instead of going to every server and issuing the "Set NDS Trace To Screen = ON" command to view information about NDS, DS Expert lets you gather this information from multiple servers simultaneously. DS Expert also lets you filter and display only the information that you want to see.

One thing I did not like about DS Expert was its lack of tracking errors over time. It would have been helpful to have this product record any errors that occurred within the last 24 hours or over the last 72 hours.

James E. Drews is a network administrator for the Computer Aided Engineering Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He can be reached at drews@engr.wisc.edu.