What does the NOADVERT switch do when loading BROKER.NLM?

(Last modified: 11Sep2002)

This document (10069799) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

goal

fact

Novell NetWare 6

Novell NetWare 5.1

NDPS v3.00

NDPS v2.1

Novell Distributed Print Services

symptom

There are many NDPS Brokers on the WAN

The sites on the WAN are connected via slow WAN links

The majority of the WAN traffic is SRS syncronization

fix

Loading the NDPS Broker with the /NOADVERT switch will prevent the NDPS Broker from automatically loading the SRS. The SRS will show up as disabled in the Broker screen. Attempts to enable the SRS from Broker screen will result in failure.

However, the SRS can be manually loaded after the Broker has been loaded from the server console. This is done by typing "LOAD REGSRVR" from the command line. If the Broker has been loaded with the /NOADVERT switch and REGSRVR.NLM is loaded after the fact, the SRS will not communicate with other SRSes on the network, nor will it register itself with SLP. So if you have numerous SRSes on your network (WAN) and public access printers on the network, you will only be able to see the public access printer agents local to that SRS.

The /NOADVERT switch was implemented to alleviate SRS traffic over WAN environments with slow WAN links. Please see the HISTORY section below for normal SRS behavior.

The following modules have the /NOADVERT switch implemented.

BROKER.NLM v3.00d dated 25MAR2002 or later.
NTFYSRVR.NLM v3.00d dated 25MAR2002 or later.
REGSRVR.NLM v3.00f dated 25MAR2002 or later.
RMANSRVR.NLM v3.02d dated 25MAR2002 or later.

These modules are available in NDP21P4.EXE. They will also be made available in NW51SP5.EXE and NW6SP2.EXE, if and when those patches become available.

KNOWN ISSUES: The only known issue with the above mentioned modules is the Broker (and other modules) will bind to the internal IPX address of the NetWare server, even if that server does not have IPX bound to it. This can be seen by using DSBROWSE and looking at the network address attribute on the NDPS Broker object. This issue will be addressed in NW51SP5.EXE and NW6SP2.EXE, if and when those patches become available. You can work around this by loading the NDPS Broker with the /NOIPX switch.

HISTORY:

Normally, all the SRSes on a network communicate with each other. Each SRS on the network "pings" every other known SRS once a minute. This ping packet is used to query the destination SRS if any new printers have been added to the network since the last ping packet. In addition to the ping packet, each SRS looks for new SRSes once an hour. If there are few SRSes on the network with fast nework links between each SRS, then this traffic is not significant. However if there are a lot of SRSes and all these SRSes are separated by slow links (such as 56k WAN links), then this traffic can be significant. Careful planning should be used if there will be many Brokers on a network.

document

Document Title:	What does the NOADVERT switch do when loading BROKER.NLM?
Document ID:	10069799
Solution ID:	NOVL75998
Creation Date:	04Apr2002
Modified Date:	11Sep2002
Novell Product Class:	NetWare

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