Disk Management Utilities for NetWare 5.1
Articles and Tips: qna
01 Apr 2001
Q.
Dear Ab-end: I need a utility that can manage disk space on my NetWare 5.1 servers. It should have the following capabilities:
Show disk space used, disk space available, and the restrictions for all or part of the users on all or part of the servers on all or part of the tree.
Warn the administrator when a user is reaching a preset threshold of the restricted space allotment.
Allow the administrator to adjust user space restrictions, or allow the administrator to allot another pre-set amount of disk space on the fly, and notify the administrator of that action.
Perform trend tracking of space consumption over time on all the servers in the tree.
Tell me what percentage and total disk space is taken up by files that have not been accessed for, say, five years.
Ideally, I am looking for a product that could run on a desktop/server and only remotely query the servers on the tree, so that it would not put any extra load on the servers by running NLMs. - Needing to Administer Disk Space
A.
Dear Needing: I do know of a third-party utility called BindView. But be warned; the company is no longer selling it as a standalone tool. They're offering it as part of a complete monitoring and management system. That isn't necessarily a bad thing--I know of very happy BindView customers. But if you only want space management, you might have to find another tool.
If you don't mind doing a little work on your own, you may want to look at JRButils. They are less expensive than BindView, and they will give you most of the data that you're asking for through the GetQuota utility. GetQuota can display disk quotas, disk usage and disk available for multiple users. It can handle both volume-based and directory-based quotas. This tool can:
Obtain a user's home directory from the bindery
Show a user's volume quotas on all volumes or on a single volume
Show quotas on all subdirectories of a directory
Provide optional sorting into ascending or descending order of quota, space used, space available, or by user name
Provide optional totals only
Suppress any of the output (quotas, space used, space available)
Filter by value (for example, list all users whose usage exceeds 100 MB)
Provide output in bytes, 4096 byte blocks, KB, MB or GB
Display all volume quotas on a volume
Operate on users' mail directories
Display values for queue directories
Accept and display paths in the DOS or LONG name space
The latest version also has a graphical user interface. The disadvantage of this tool is that it does not perform active monitoring. It only has live reports in a text format, so you couldn't perform live alerting. If you're a little creative, though, you could probably write a simple PERL script to run on a desktop. You could run this script once per day and log the results into a spreadsheet. With a little spreadsheet work, you could easily turn cells red when someone is over 80% usage, and so on.
The SetQuota utility can do the quota "bumping" that you want to do, and the WhoDidIt utility can list the access date of files.
Check these URLs for more information:
http://www.jrbsoftware.com/06utilsa1.htm#Getquota
There may be other off-the-shelf utilities that I'm unaware of that would be well-suited for the job; these are just some suggestions. (Answer supplied by Todd Dailey and Dan Chase of Novell, Inc.)
* Originally published in Novell AppNotes
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