Rebuilds and nwadmin

Friday afternoon the Kala server, one of our three primary eDirectory replica servers, died. In event I've never seen before, one hard drive of a mirrored pair failed in such a way that bad data got committed. This server had to be rebuilt.

Happily for me, this is a procedure I can do without having to look things up in the Novell KB. This is part of the reason the letters "CNE" follow my name. The procedure is pretty straight-forward and I've done it before.
  1. Remove dead server's objects from the tree
  2. Designate a new server as the Master for any replica this server was the master of (all of them, as it happened)
  3. Install server fresh
The details change somewhat over time, but that's the same workflow it has been since the NetWare 4 days. In my case I did hit the KB to see if there was a way to do step 2 in iMonitor. I couldn't find one, so I did it through DSREPAIR which works just fine.

As for the install... this server is an HP BL20P G3, which means I used the procedure I documented a while back (Novell, local copy). A few minor steps changed (the INSERT Linux I used then now correctly handles SmartArray cards), but otherwise that's what I did. Still works.

For a wonder, our SSL administrator still had the custom SSL certificate we created for this server three years ago. That saved me the step of creating a CSR and setting up all the Subject Alternate Names we needed.

And today I fired up NWADMIN for the first time in not nearly long enough to associate the SLP scope to this server, since it was one of our two DA's. I could probably have done the same thing in iManager with "Other" attributes, but... why risk not getting all the right attributes associated when I have a tool that has all the built-in rules. This is the one thing that I still have NWAdmin around for. SLP-on-NetWare management.