Previous | Table of Contents | Next |
Network components that are configured consistentlyidentically, when possibleare a godsend to busy network troubleshooters. In particular, Ill discuss three techniques in this hour that will help you build and maintain as consistent (homogenous in geek speak) a network as possible:
Apart from the obvious benefits of planning once and deploying many times, these consistency techniques are going to make your troubleshooting life a lot less complex.
In addition, here are four network components that, if kept standardized, can contribute to an easy life as a troubleshooter:
Having identically configured components means that if one component works in one place, it should work in others as well, unless a hardware problem exists. (Hardware problems also become more obvious if everybodys on the same operating system page.) It also means that you dont have to understand many problems in order to troubleshoot them. Instead of having to understand the nuts and bolts behind a complex network configuration, you can compare simple items to known good items (for example, login scripts or user attributes) or quickly redo more complex items.
For example, once you discover that a workstation thats supposed to be identical to other workstations is having an operating system or application problem (youve ruled out the entire user object, user attributes, and network application configuration), you can simply clone its hard drive. This operation takes 15 minutes (versus the hours that you might spend troubleshooting it otherwise). Whats more, if the hard drives are indeed all configured the same, cloning the workstation couldnt hurtthat is, at least it wont hurt the configuration thats supposed to be on the drive.
To keep from upsetting your users, you need to communicate before you leap. That is, you need to let your users know that keeping data files on their hard drives is a really, really bad idea. Apart from the fact that their data will be lost in the event of a hard drive failurecmon, how many people you know back up their hard drives every single day?the cloning of a given hard drive completely overwrites any information stored there.
Heres the bottom line: Troubleshooting starts with identifying whether the problem is local or systemic. If its a local problem, you can often treat it via homogenization of the workstation or user object. This means that, typically, all you need to spend your brain power on are the systemic problems. If you apply the techniques in this hour, local problems will become no-brainers.
You dont really need automated deployment tools in order to get organized (on the other hand, they do make tasks go a lot quicker and easier). Regardless of whether you choose to use power tools or a hand drill to automate your network rollouts, in order to be successful, you definitely need a well-defined work plan. (Its an old saw in the automation game: How can you automate anything that has yet to be done manually?)
Lets look at the parts of your work plan that will need to be addressed whether you automate or deploy manually:
In short, the characteristics of a good network rolloutbig or smallare basically your good work habits translated to the computing arena. Try to think of any network rollout as a factory job or as a cookie-cutting session: Anything done to one network object must be done to the next network object.
Although you can manually configure each object identically, unless youre quite the machine, theres no guarantee that each object will be exactly the same.
Your network operating system provides you with the basic tools to help you in your consistency quest:
User templates are awesome, but theyre really just a takeoff of what network administrators have been doing for years: Creating a Joe User, testing him out, and then duplicating all his attributes for the other users. As a matter of fact, the only network operating system I know of that actually has a formalized facility for user templates is NetWare (via Novells NDS). Other systems have various user copy utilitiesand frankly, these work just fine, as long as you remember to use them. Figure 16.1 shows the copy user feature for Windows NT.
Figure 16.1 You can use NTs User Manager for Domains to copy a domain user.
Previous | Table of Contents | Next |