Bases of complete control of the server

Added: 11/07/2005

Control of a server is a main task for system administrators. This activity can become very complicated for large corporative networks and there is a hard life for administrators that work in the hosting companies as well. Therefore, software developers took care of these people and proposed some software products that could be helpful in such cases.

The complete control of the server is a main task for administrators. Due to the significant growth of the Internet popularity, control tools for the networks have become very important. Actually, the networks are not restricted with the limits of an enterprise, since they are connected to the global information systems and are available overall. The complete control of the server or its audit allows to detect its susceptibilities and improve the system's reliability.

The network administrators require opportunities to set control after the disk space very often. Users treat copying local disks contents to the server as the fastest way for a backup. This practice results with an unstable server work, as such users' actions leave less resources for the important system's components. NetWare administrators can restrict the size of the available disk space for each user, however this feature is not implemented in Windows NT.

Northern Technologies and New Technology Partners companies created software systems for the complete control of the server disk space for Windows NT, called Quota Server and Quota Manager. These products control the disk space taken by the catalogues, although they do not add any restrictions for the users. This is the main disadvantage for both products.

The administrators would like to control the network printers as well. Neither Windows NT nor NetWare provide any tools for defining the number of the printed pages. There are some solutions, depending on the opportunity, to use customized hardware. Thus, the DataProducts printer is able to store the information about the pages count. This data could be downloaded to the workstation for the further handling. Therefore, the most part of the used printers does not have such function. The other existing methods assume a preliminary handling of the printing data, slowing the printing process in this way.

Software metering is another way for the application usage audit and control for the following license agreements. The most part of the software tools in this group are able to determine who is working with the applications, some of them can define the time of the application usage.

Collecting, systematizing and documenting data about the users' access to some server's resources is an important part of the complete control of the server process. Thus, NetWare and Windows NT do not have any good enough utilities for the server audit. At the same time, such systems can be provided by the side companies. For instance, the Preferred Systems Company proposes an AuditWare product for the NetWare 4.1 server that permits to receive information about the access permissions availability.

The complete control of the server hardware part is a very complicated activity. Usually, the administrators document all the information about the server at its installation. Afterwards, they update this data, when making changes to its micro software. Some servers' producers provide tools of the software control and diagnostics. For instance, the Compaq Company proposes a Compaq Insight Manager product. This software requests all the servers in the network, collects the information about their BIOS version. This table can be loaded from the corporative web server.

All the software features mentioned above are effective tools for the complete control of the server.

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