When you need to modify trustee rights

Back in the days of NetWare 3, I used two utilities – GRANT and REVOKE – to control file trustee rights over the short term. Actually, I used one of John Baird’s utilities (link below) to create a list of trustee rights for files and folders and used that list with REVOKE when I wanted to keep people out so I could do a backup of a database, for example. I then would re-apply the rights using the list and GRANT.

GRANT and REVOKE disappeared around the time of NetWare 5, to be replaced by the all-encompassing RIGHTS utility, which could set, remove or report on trustee rights. RIGHTS remains useful, but it has a serious flaw: it doesn’t understand long file names. Well, it is a DOS program but still, how many of your network servers do you still insist only have 8.3 filenames on them?

TRUSTEES 3.0 solves that problem. This user-created utility is now available from the NetWare “Cool Solutions” Web site (https://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/1679.html) and is a quick, efficient alternative when you need to read, save, modify or restore file system trustee rights.

TRUSTEES 3.0 has two options, READ and WRITE. The READ option reads file system trustees for a server volume on a file-by-file basis and writes them to a text file. The WRITE option takes a text file as input and creates trustee rights. It actually takes longer to talk about TRUSTEES 3.0 than it does to learn or use it. Just get it. It’s free, it’s useful and it works.

While you’re at the Cool Solutions site, there’s another very useful tool to download. NoClone (https://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/1914.html) is a duplicate file finder that works at the byte level. Any network worth having a full time administrator is almost guaranteed to have duplicate files. Most of these occur because users send them around to each other, or store multiple copies (under different names) in the hopes that you won’t find them. There’s rarely a real need for more than one copy of any file, though, other than to waste space. NoClone will find them all and give you a report identifying the files by name and location. It’s then up to you to decide what to do about them, but you’d want that ability anyway.

So there you have it, two useful tools for your network manager’s tool bag – one free (TRUSTEES 3.0) and one shareware (NoClone) and both available from Novell. Download them now and help make your administrative life easier.