Managing the NDS tree

Planning and creating partitions and replicas

You can create additional partitions and replicas using NetWare Administrator or PARTMGR in DOS or Windows. Instructions for using these utilities are included in this topic.

What happens during installation

By default, the installation utility adds a replica of the partition that contains the server's context only if the total of existing replicas is fewer than three.

However, if the server is not a NetWare 4^® server and contains bindery files (SYS:SYSTEM\NET$*.SYS) a replica is added, regardless of the number of replicas.

These default settings ensure that bindery services will work correctly for networks running both NetWare 3^® and NetWare 4 software.

For more information about bindery services and directory partitions, see Administering NetWare Directory Services.

Guidelines for managing partitions and replicas

Use these guidelines for managing partitions and replicas:

Make sure all the servers that contain replicas are up and running before you attempt any partition operation.
If you attempt a partition operation while a server (that contains a replica) is down, NDS will not be able to synchronize, since it will not be able to communicate with the replica on the downed server.
You can create partitions only at the container level of the Directory tree.
NDS does not require you to have a replica of the complete database in any location; the database is designed to be divided into usable pieces.
Operations to manage partitions or replicas take place in the background and take time to complete, since the replicas need to be synchronized with new information.
You cannot store more than one replica of the same partition on a server. It is not necessary for all servers in your Directory tree to store partitions or replicas unless you want to be able to log in to every server in your tree using bindery services.
You can create as many replicas of a partition as you need; however, we recommend that you create between three and six replicas of each partition in your Directory tree.
Having too many replicas may slow down your network because it will be busy synchronizing.
You can have only one master replica.

Because partition and replica management is such a vital part of managing your network, you should read ``Managing NDS'' before you use the Partition Manager utilities.

See ``PARTMGR'' for a description of the PARTMGR utility. Planning and using partitions is described in detail in ``Planning an NDS implementation''.