NDS corruption with Insight Manager and DSrepair

[Ayman Altounji]

Has anyone had any experience of the problem outlined in Novell's TID 10056191 regarding corruption of the NDS database when doing a dsrepair while Insight Manager is loaded, it is believed to be a problem in NDS.

Andy..

[Ayman Altounji]

I have not experienced this problem, but our company will soon be moving to NetWare 5.1 with eDirectory (8 or 8.5) and I would like to know if anyone has any specifics on how to recreate the problem so I can see if the problem might affect us. All of our servers are Compaq, the majority of them have SMART array controllers, and all are running CIM so it sounds like we are at risk to experience this problem. I've tested our configuration in our lab and I have not seen the problem, but labs are not the final answer to everything. Any information would be helpful.

[Ayman Altounji]

our customer just moved to 5.1 with eDirectory (65 Sites, 72 Servers). All sites with ProLiant 1600 and Smart Array controllers, CIM loaded. This tree was designed and installed from Novell Consulting Germany and the consultans told the customer, to unload CIM on the servers, holding all Master-Replicas (one of the servers), and holding Read/Write Replicas of all partitions (more than 80 partitions). So the both servers, holding the replicas (Master and Read/Write) are without CIM! We had heavy inconsistences in the DS, but it is not finally clear, if CIM was the reason. Propably the firmware of the drives, because after updating that firmware, no DS damages are occured. Its just recommendet not to load CIM on the NDS servers until this issue is finally clear.

[Ayman Altounji]

We have found that unless you are using ROM update 4.44 for the 3200 Smart Array's you will get a lot of DS corruptions running Novell 5.1 and NDS 8.

[Ayman Altounji]

This is a serious problem with NDS that shows up when you are running Compaq's Agents or anybody elses SNMP agents. This is Novell's official position on this as of January 24th:

Quote from Novell support case #10056191:
Novell engineers have identified an issue when NDS is used in combination with CIM and/or NetPro's DSAnalyzer and/or NetVision's products. Novell is actively partnering with Compaq and NetPro to rectify the issue. Until the issue is fully identified and a resolution has been provided, it is recommended to unload these products to circumvent further NDS corruption. In all reported cases, unloading the above mentioned products has resolved the corruption issue.