Alternatives to eDirectory Tree Merge
Articles and Tips: qna
01 Jul 2003
Q.
I know a guy who is the IS Manager in a company that has recently merged with a second company. Their management wants to combine their current Novell environments. However, they would prefer not to merge the two directory trees, as the newly acquired eDirectory tree isn't structured very well and rather than to re-engineer the content of this tree either before or after a merge, they would like to migrate in such a way that all users log into one tree.
They queried about the possibility of using a federated tree (it's my understanding that this technology has been shelved and isn't really an option). Between the two companies the eDirectory versions range from 6 to 8, but does not include anything greater than 8.5, although they do plan to implement eDirectory 8.7. I have been thinking about suggesting to him to use DirXML to synchronize and migrate in one direction the users from one tree to the other. What do you think would be a good solution?
Molly in a Tree Merging Mess
A.
Dear Molly: Let me quote from one of our own Novell Engineers, Sean Stanton: "The versions of eDirectory that did support federated trees required that both trees be created with the naming syntax "abc.com." If the trees do not have these types of names to begin with, even the versions of eDirectory that supported federated trees won't do them any good. They would still have to create two new trees from scratch using this naming syntax and then "federate" them.
I agree with your recommendation that DirXML should be used to migrate the objects from the one tree that has the "bad" structure to the good one. They would have to put up with dual tree logins for a little while as the resources were migrated, but the passwords would be synchronized and the attachments to the other tree could be done invisibly to the users via the "Tree" command in the login scripts. They would have to put at least one eDirectory server into each tree for the NDS-to-NDS DirXML connection between the trees.
* Originally published in Novell AppNotes
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