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.