Flex your intellectual muscle

[Editor's Note: Solve this month's Windows NT problem and get the chance to win $100 or a copy of one of the author's books about NT. Email your solutions (don't use an attachment) to challenge@winntmag.com. Include your full name, mailing address, and connection to NT (e.g., administrator, user). Because of the number of entries, we can't reply to all respondents. Look for the solution to this month's problem in the February issue.]

Fast Freddie is a systems administrator with more energy and enthusiasm than anyone else in the IT department. Freddie's enthusiasm drives his boss crazy. On a recent Monday morning, Freddie flew through the doorway of his boss' office and yelled, "I have a brilliant idea. You'll love it." Freddie's boss laid her head on her desk and replied, "Go away. It's too early."

"No. You'll love this idea," Freddie continued. "I'm converting all the servers that we use for file services to volume sets. The servers have multiple partitions or multiple logical drives, and volume sets let users access data more easily because users need to remember only one drive letter. File access is much faster with volume sets when you're reading or writing files. Plus, the way the OS uses hard disk space is more efficient. And an added security advantage is that volume sets provide redundancy."

Freddie's boss shook her head. "Your approach has one major flaw," she told him.

Problem
What's the flaw in Freddie's reasons for changing the company's file servers to volume sets?

AUGUST WINNERS
Congratulations to Dean McCall, a programmer analyst at Texas Tech University, and to Steve Kuechle, a consultant in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. Dean won first prize of $100 for the best solution to the August Reader Challenge. Steve won second prize of a copy of Windows NT Troubleshooting (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1998).

Problem
Moira was a network administrator for a small business. The business grew, and Moira had to add servers and workstations. Multiple servers meant she had to learn and make notes about replication. We've found her notes about adding servers. Your challenge is to determine which of her assumptions are correct and which will cause her a problem.

  1. Regardless of file extensions or attributes, the system automatically replicates all files placed in \winnt\system32\repl\export.
  2. If you properly configure the replication process, the system will use both workstations and servers as sources of exports.
  3. The configuration option to include the account database (SAM) is part of the Advanced setup for replication, and you must configure the option properly to avoid separate replication processes for the SAM.

Solution
All Moira's assumptions are incorrect.

  1. The system doesn't place any files directly in the \winnt\system32\repl\export directory. The system replicates only the contents of subdirectories under the \export subdirectory.
  2. Only servers can export, but workstations can import.
  3. The SAM doesn't deal with replication, and you can't configure replication to include the SAM. The account database's replication is a separate process called synchronization.

End of Article


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