Wan with 4.11 and 6

[awpmi]

We have a wan situtaion where most of the servers were using netware 4.11 up until recently. One of the servers died, and on the replacement server Netware 6 was used. (I had nothing to do with that decision...).

Integrating this unit into the tree has caused some problems to develop. BTW, the DS has now been upgraded to 6.17.

After about 2 weeks, people's rights to certain objects were lost on certain servers and then the LOGIN SCRIPTs stopped running.

They will only run if you are an adminsitrator. The compnay has an open case with Novell, but they haven't been able to solve it.

I have read that licensing might cause login scripts not to run (reinstalling them higher in the tree)...but I'd like some feedback on that as I don't recall originally installing licensing into the tree.

 

[Provogeek]

This is an issue with DS. NetWare 6 uses DS 8.6.2 and it has many many issues with DS 6.x that Netware 4.x uses. The biggest problem is the inability to understand aux class atributes on DS 6's part.

I had an issue my self were the admin user lost all file system rights to the NW6 server, but worked fine for the 4.x server. What I did to fix this was to remove the NW6 server from the replica ring the NW4 server was in. Once the servers were in their own partition, the replica would sync with out issue with other 6 server in the NW6 replica ring. The NW4 servers would sync no problem with the other NW4 servers in their replica ring.

So what I have found is you can have NW4 and NW6 server in the same tree; just not in the same replica ring.


PS: If the choice to get this NW server was because NW4.x is no longer avilable nor supported, you should also have a NetWare 6 upgrade comming down the line to replace your NW4.x boxes. Almost sounds to me like a var taking advantage of an uninformed manager holding a check book. Unless you are making plans to move your whole network to NW6, you should get that NW6 server outa the picture. NW6 is awsome, but a real pain when you also have NW4 in play. You will hear from people that hardware is too new and installing NW4 onto the new hardware is not posible. This is incorrect, it can be done, and it is actually quite simple. All you need is the basics of NW4 and the lates SP, along with the knowledge of how to maually install the SP onto the DOS partition. Brent Schmidt CNE,Network +
Senior Network Engineer
Keep IT Simple

http://www.kiscc.com

 

[awpmi]

Thanks for the tips on the replica rings. Perhaps I can change the paritions around, but they wound putting all the masters on that new server. :-( We may just have to live wiht this weird amalgam. The vendor and mgmt basically went ahead without thinking deeply about it. As a note, 2 weeks after the nw6 installation, some of the 4.11 servers 500 miles away had the admin users lose rights to their branch of the tree. That's back in business due to using the admin of the tree to grant rights back. More extensive surgery due to the interoperability problems makes one shudder. From what you wrote I gather that if it was your network, you would STRONGLY recommend getting rid of the nw6 out of the replica rings, right? I may make that recommendation. They know they have problems.

Had I been involved in that 6 scenarior I would have advocated replacing the crashed server and just re-installing the 4.11 on the new server. In fact, we may well be doing that shortly with one of the other 4.11 servers.

I don't have much experience with nw6, but I see it's got java which can present issues at times for this scenario. Any comment on that? It may already be turned off.

 

[Provogeek]

If it were my network, I would push for the complete roll out of NetWare 6, cause I thing 6 rocks. I know it, I use it and I like it.

In this case there is a training curve, so falling back to NW4 may be a good choice. You will have some tree repair to do, but it will be repairable. Do be on the look out for obits, and give the pesky ones at least a day before calling NTS to help.

Java is needed to run iManager, iFolder, Remote Manager, and other web based features in NW6, so you will loose functionality by unloading Java. Now in some cases such as yours, this does not matter. You do not have to use these new features, and you can still administer the server using NWAdmin. Noow there still will be some changes, but you can minimize those to just what you need it to do.
Brent Schmidt CNE,Network +
Senior Network Engineer
Keep IT Simple

http://www.kiscc.com