Files. Admit it: they’re still all over your network, aren’t they? In fact, there are probably soooooo many of them out there that you’ve lost track.
What kind of files are out there?
Who owns them?
How old and stale are they?
Who has access to what??
And how many of those pesky duplicates are there?
In most organizations I visit, there are absolutely no easy way to answer these questions. Server by server, someone’s got to do a manual inventory and put together a report.
Sigh.
Tedious. Boring. Unproductive work.
For fairly critical knowledge about your network, don’t you think?
Well, in this post, I’m not going to go on and on about a product. Instead, I’m going to show you how someone using Novell File Reporter 2.0 could answer the above questions in, oh….about 3 mouse clicks and 40 seconds.
1. Starting out
After logging in, the dashboard:
Setup your scan targets; this could include any number of shares on any number of servers across your organization:
Setup your policies – what is it that you want to scan? Configure these once, schedule them to refresh automatically, if you want, and you’re done:
Configure the reports you want to have access to:
And that’s it! You’re now ready to start digging in!
2. Reporting
What are my biggest folders out there?
Hm. Let’s drill down into that a little bit more:
Ok, so who owns a lot of that stuff?
Wow. Gotta talk to that network Admin – he’s such a hog!
Is this stuff all current, at least?
Ouch! Only 18Gbs has been touched in the past year; everything else hasn’t been modified in over 2 years! (Why am I backing up all this stuff every night, then?! Can’t wait for Part III of this series…)
Any duplicates? Any duplicates?
Of course. But not too bad. I could drill down and see exactly where all these files are, eventually. Clean ’em out, you know.
And finally, exactly what kind of files are out there?
Eeeh. That’s a lot of EXE’s and ISO’s! I’m going to have to drill down on these and see why there are so many.
(All of the above reports, by the way, took me about 2 minutes to produce!)
3. Permissions
Two important questions, here…
1. Where does this user have access? Let’s look at Teresa…
Ok, so I can see her Direct assignments as well as the groups she’s inheriting from.
2.I’m also concerned about Murray’s directory, though, and I’d like to know who has access to it:
All right – that makes sense!
4. Folder Summaries
Without even producing reports, I can also get a quick overview of my storage and where the space is being used:
Very nice! Now that I know exactly what I’ve got, how old it is, what it is, etc, I can start planning some policy based storage management!
Files Matter, Part II – Novell Storage Manager
Being a Novell product, does this only work on Novell servers? What about Windows Servers?
It absolutely works in BOTH environments, or even a MIX of both! The reporting engine actually runs on a Windows server, and there are agents available for both Windows Server and Open Enterprise Server.
At this point in time, pretty much ALL Novell solutions work natively in Microsoft/AD environments and are not at all dependent on the traditional “Novell” infrastructure, so Microsoft customers also benefit from these great solutions.