The verbal ticks of old tyme NetWare admins

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A conversation I read recently reminded me of this one. One of the things that caused me to grind teeth at my old job was the use of the word 'dsrepair' as a catch-all for anything run inside of dsrepair. This extended to some TIDs, which made the problem more wide-spread than my little corner of NetWare-land. The problem only started abating when it became possible to do some of the dsrepair tasks without actually loading DSREPAIR.NLM.

I'd see documentation like this one (generated internally, though my treacherous memory is telling me that a very early version of the NDS Health Check TID also had the bad phrasing):
  1. Rconsole to the console
  2. Run dsrepair until there are no errors
  3. In NWAdmin...
What am I doing in DSREPAIR? Unattended health check? Timesync-check and sych-status check? Local trustee check? Check external references? Full database repair? WHAT? DSREPAIR does a lot of things. It is not VREPAIR, where it either works or it doesn't.

The phrase, "run dsrepair until there are no errors," showed up a lot for a few years there. The conversation I read showed a clear case of an Old Tyme NetWare Admin maintaining the sense of dark mystery around dsrepair, which caused their young apprentice to go out into the world with an incomplete understanding of what this tool really does. This is a verbal short-cut that I'm glad has died out.

2 Comments

Funny you mention this. I used to do unattended repair out of habbit when I first started doing this stuff for real two years ago. It found errors, it corrected them, I thought life was good. When I was getting ready to upgrade to eDirectory from NDS and upgrading 5.1 servers to 6.5, I read instances on Novell's message boards where posters claimed the unattended repair was a sledgehammer method where one was not needed.I've since realized that eDirectory is a lot smarter than I thought it was. Generally, I just check syncronization status and time sync from time to time. If I feel something isn't right, I'll do a health check to see what errors are kicked back. But I haven't done a full UR in a year. It's never really fixed any problem for me where I said, "doing that dsrepair UR sorted out the issue".As an aside. From some reading, I'm thankful I have to admin eDirectory and not Active Directory. AD seems like it's a cludgy and far less flexible directory service. Sooner or later I'm sure I'll have to work with it. I hope it's better by then.

You know, I think I used to refer to Dsrepair by the settings, instead of even referenceing "Dsrepair", when I'd tell my flunkies, er "employees", to run it. As in, "Run and 'unattended full', wait an hour and see if that fixes the problem. If not, run another 'unattended full' and I'll look at it in the morning."Naturally, they couldn't follow that, so I had to cut my *honeymoon* short to come back to the office and run that, then watch NDS heal itself. The marriage lasted only a little longer than the job. Go figure.