Previous Table of Contents Next


Part IV
In the Trenches

Hour
16  “Beauty is Consistency Deep”: Saving Yourself Trouble
17  Where Do I Start?
18  “Lots of Different People in Your Neighborhood”: In-Depth Application Troubleshooting
19  Internet/Intranet Troubleshooting
20  “Network Troubleshooters Just Wanna Have Fun”
21  “Tell Me About Your Network”: Network Analyzers
22  “Who Watches The Watchmen?”: Network Management Tools
23  “The Network is Slow!”: Getting a Definitive Answer to a Subjective Question
24  Reverse-Engineering Somebody Else’s Network

Hour 16
Beauty Is Consistency Deep: Saving Yourself Trouble

Network components that are configured consistently—identically, when possible—are a godsend to busy network troubleshooters. In particular, I’ll discuss three techniques in this hour that will help you build and maintain as consistent (homogenous in geek speak) a network as possible:

  Manual consistency methods (which rely mostly on personal organization skills combined with the exploitation of operating system features)
  Hard drive duplication (cloning)
  The use of newer, automated deployment tools

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:

  Hard drive configuration
  Network login scripts
  Network user attributes
  Network application configuration

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 everybody’s on the same operating system page.) It also means that you don’t 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 that’s supposed to be identical to other workstations is having an operating system or application problem (you’ve 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). What’s more, if the hard drives are indeed all configured the same, cloning the workstation couldn’t hurt—that is, at least it won’t hurt the configuration that’s 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 failure—c’mon, 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.

Here’s the bottom line: Troubleshooting starts with identifying whether the problem is local or systemic. If it’s 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.

Manual Standardization

You don’t 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. (It’s an old saw in the automation game: How can you automate anything that has yet to be done manually?)

Let’s look at the parts of your work plan that will need to be addressed whether you automate or deploy manually:

  Divide tasks into workstation-oriented tasks and user setup–oriented tasks
  Make checklists of tasks that must be completed
  Keep good records
  Write down a detailed rollout plan, shoot holes in it, and refine the plan
  Resist the temptation to deviate from the plan

In short, the characteristics of a good network rollout—big or small—are 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 you’re quite the machine, there’s no guarantee that each object will be exactly the same.

Power Tool Time

Your network operating system provides you with the basic tools to help you in your consistency quest:

  User templates These enable you to copy an existing user.
  User-level login scripts Login scripts exist to perform various startup configurations, such as adding a PATH to a user’s environment, showing a message of the day, and so on. User-level login scripts are scripts that are run when an individual user logs in.
  Organizational or group-level login scripts Organizational or group scripts run when anybody from that group or organization logs in.
  User network profiles Network profiles are network-stored configuration information, such as your Windows desktop, Start menu, preferences, and so on. (We’ll discuss these in more detail later in this hour.)

User Templates

User templates are awesome, but they’re 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 Novell’s NDS). Other systems have various user copy utilities—and 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 NT’s User Manager for Domains to copy a domain user.


Previous Table of Contents Next