By Dave Kearns
I was cleaning up my Web site the other day, and came across
what I believe is the first article - well, first published
article - that I ever wrote about NetWare. It was published in a
long-forgotten magazine called NetWare Solutions. Oddly enough,
the editor of NetWare Solutions was
Deni Connor , who now covers Novell, among other things, for Network World.
The article was published back in 1993 (the copyright on it is 1994, because that's when I "revised" it for the newest version
of NetWare).
The article is called "So you inherited a what?" and deals with
what to do when you "inherit" the network. Back in the early
1990s, it wasn't uncommon for NetWare to be limited to
departmental duties, administered by a part-time manager.
Whenever that manager would move on to bigger and better things,
someone else in the department would inherit the onerous task of
taking care of the network. Still, since it was NetWare, there
weren't a lot of things to do - the network just ran. And ran.
And kept running. Still, there were things you needed to do and,
surprisingly, those same things are just as relevant today.
True, you rarely inherit the network any more, but many, if not
most of us have been faced with starting a new job taking care
of an existing network. Here are the steps I recommended then,
and what changes I'd make today.
1) Locate the back-up tapes. If they're not current, schedule a
full system backup.
2) Locate the installation media.
3) Get a good reference book.
4) Find the documentation (not the manual, the documented
configuration of the network) or get started in preparing it.
5) Locate your local users group.
6) Register with online support groups.
7) Contact and meet with your vendors.
For step 2, the original article talked about the installation
disks. For you youngsters, these were 5.25-inch square envelopes
holding a thin disk of magnetic media. Each held a whopping 640K
bytes of data. Today, of course, you'd need to get the CDs or
the downloaded files that were used for the installation as well
as the service packs, patches and updates that had been applied.
For step 6, the original article talked about the NetWare forum
on Compuserve. That's been gone for quite a long time;
Novell's support forums are the modern equivalent.
As for the reference book, sadly, Pat Corrigan's "Building Local
Area Networks With Novell's NetWare," was last published for
NetWare 3.12. Fortunately, Novell Press has
lots of books available no matter what version of NetWare you're running.
Still, even 12 years later, most of what I wrote then holds true
now, including the conclusion that if you follow all of these
tips, you'd be well on your way to becoming a successful network
manager.
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To contact Dave Kearns:
Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. He's
written a number of books including the (sadly) now out of print
"Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks." His musings can be
found here.
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