Novell Netware: Trees won't play nice. Help needed.

Factual Questions
1

Here is the situation. I hope I can explain this right, if you wan’t a diagram I will make one.

We have 5 buildings. Two of them are located on one campus and are fiber-connected into one flat LAN. I will call these buildings A and B. The other 3 are remote locations connected to building A via T1s. The three remote buildings shouldn’t be important in this discussion.

I will now describe how the network used to be. Building A had a Neware 3.12 server. All of the other buildings had Netware 4.11 servers all in one tree, the server in building B is the head of that tree. This will be called “the Old tree.”

Building A outgrew its netware 3.12 server that was a 200 mhz with 4 gigs of space. We replaced it with a HP Netserver Lh 3000 U3, with dual pentium 3 1.0 ghz processors and 43 gigs of storage.

We installed Netware 5.1 on this server, and made it the head of a new tree. This server is currently running IPX only.

Most of the time, people in building A can see the new tree (and ONLY the new tree) and everything works great. The same is true in building B, they see only the old tree. If either of these 2 servers goes down, the computers that were logged into them suddenly start seeing the other tree.

Well, we need to move about 95% of the clients in building B to the 5.1 server in building A. These clients can only see one tree at a time (we are using the newest client for windows and have tried several others). The 5% that need the old server are physically located it the same place.

Occasionally, a computer in building A will “lose” the new tree and get stuck on the old one. Rebooting several times until the correct tree shows up is all we can do.

We need to do one of the following

  1. make it so everyone can see both trees.
  2. Figure out how to make the clients connect to the correct tree. ( preferred tree setting doesn’t help, will still see wrong tree and not be able to login to new one)
  3. Segregate the old building B server to only the 5% that need it, using some kind of Cisco box and VLAN. (no one here knows how and the chances of getting money approved to do this are slim to none)
    This problem also causes problems with some of our HP jetDirect printers. When we reboot the new server, some of them seem to jump over to the old tree, and we have to reconfigure these printers.

Also, we get constant SAP and RIP configuration errors on all of the servers. This is the SAP message from the new server:“Node XXXXXX (server in building B)claims address XXXXXXX should be 0000000f2”

How do we have the money to buy this technology, yet absolutely no money for tech support? We are a public school, thats how.

Anyone that helps with this problem is entitled to come to our high school for free donuts and lunch from Wendy’s.

Thanks.

2

My first suggestion is to try the Novell newsgroups (you can find a link to them on their website, or try this). A lot of very very helpful people there.

The easiest idea I can come up with is this: Switch the 5.1 server to IP and run SLP with that server as the DA. Configure the clients with static DA’s, and they should never see any other tree. This is actually much easier than it sounds and there is plenty of documentation on it at Novell’s site. For now you can run the 4.11 network on IPX and that should help keep things seperate. Two protocols, two trees, and never the twain shall meet.

This would get rid of the SAP errors too, but the error you quote sounds symptomatic of some record in a routing table or possibly NDS not matching what it is finding at that address. Check that IPX addresses are not duplicated, then run DSrepair on the servers where the error is appearing. That might clear things up.

3

Thanks for your suggestion. We might try that next weekend. When we first set up the server we had IP and IPX, and some workstations wouldn’t connect so we turned off IP. I think that had to do with the subnet mask the DHCP server (turnkey Linux box) was giving out at the time so that should no longer be a problem.

4

I’ve had problems connecting to Netware 5.1 servers over IP without SLP running. This has to do with the fact that the client attempts to find the tree and server by name, so something has to resolve it to an IP address. SLP is the easiest way to accomplish this. In a single server environment it is extremely simple to configure (actually, there really isn’t much to configure at all, mostly the default setup should be fine.) Basically, if the workstations can ping the servers IP, SLP will allow them to find the tree and server to log in to without a hitch.