* Rob Bastiaansen's 'The NetWare Toolbox'
Books about NetWare are scarce. Books about NetWare that aren’t published by Novell Press qualify as rare. So it’s gratifying whenever I can come across one. And I have come across one.
I mentioned writer Rob Bastiaansen last year (http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/netware/2004/0906nw2.html) when he published “Rob’s Guide to Using VMware” (still the only “Rob’s Guide” as far as I know), which went into a lot of the benefits of NetWare on VMware. Since then Bastiaansen has been busy gathering together as many tips and tricks as he can about NetWare and he’s finally released the collection to the world as “The NetWare Toolbox” (https://www.books4brains.com/catalog.htm).
Bastiaansen states right up front that this book is not a complete guide for NetWare administrators. He notes that, “Common daily operations like creating users and managing rights on a NetWare server are explained in the product manual and many of the NetWare Administrator’s guides that are readily available” from other authors and publishers. Rather, Bastiaansen says his publication “…contains information about practical issues and uses a practical approach to solve and prevent problems that administrators can come across in their NetWare environment.”
He did not intend to create a book with all the background information that exists about the NetWare operating system, choosing instead to describe how to work with the tools and how to implement the tips in a new or existing NetWare environment. When necessary, he explains the technical concepts to help the reader understand what happens while implementing a specific tip.
The 220-plus page book is divided into an even 100 “chapters” which are grouped into 12 “categories” or sections. These are:
1. Server console Operation
2. Installation and Configuration
3. File System
4. Networking
5. Printing
6. eDirectory
7. Novell Client
8. Security
9. Clustering
10. Remote Management
11. Management Products
12. Support and other resources
To give you a taste for the tips offered, in the category of Clustering, Rob’s offers the following:
* Use NCF files instead of Load and Unload scripts.
* Install clustered application files on the shared disk.
* Build a fail-over matrix to prevent overloading the cluster nodes.
* Cluster your networking services for free.
* Setting up cluster e-mail notification.
* Adding clustering to the NSS iSCSI mirroring scenario.
These are practical tips and information you can use to make your network run better, make your job easier and – just possibly – make your budget stretch a little farther.
Check the Table of Contents and Introduction (https://www.books4brains.com/netwaretoolbox/TheNetWareToolboxTOCandIntro.pdf) to be sure, but I think this is one book you all should have a copy of.
Bastiaansen states up front that the tips were formulated with NetWare 6.x in mind, but they many will work with versions going back as far as NetWare 3 and most have been tested on Open Enterprise Server. The book is priced at $24.95.
