Exam 050-686: Foundations of Novell Networking: NetWare 6.5 Vendor Novell Status Live. Available at Pearson Vue and Prometric testing centers worldwide. Reviewer's Rating Moderate Test Information Approx. 66 questions, 75 minutes, passing score of 650 out of 800. Cost: $125 (U.S.) Who Should Take This Exam? Any NetWare administrator wanting to become CNA-certified or start toward the higher level (CNE, MCNE, etc,) certifications. Test Objectives Click here

For every certification exam, it seems as if there’s at least one expert book written that holds all the secrets to acing the test. In the case of this exam, there’s no question, in my mind, about which book that is: “Novell NetWare 6.5: CNA Exam Cram 2” by Warren Wyrostek.

To pass this exam, you need to know the basics -- the basics of networking in general (surprisingly, this knowledge will get you about 60 percent there) and the basics of the NetWare operating system. There are no questions that blindside you by testing on insignificant minutia, so if you’ve worked with the NetWare operating system and are well prepared for this exam, you’ll most likely walk out of the test center wondering what you were so worried about when you walked in.

Be sure view the official objectives here. Below is an overview of some of the major technical areas on this exam to get you started.

ACLs, eDirectory and Permissions
It’s imperative that you know what Access Control Lists (ACLs) are available for, and that in NetWare they are applicable to every file, directory and eDirectory object. This modularity gives you a great deal of power in being able to fine tune and tweak permissions as needed. eDirectory is the distributed database (think Active Directory in Windows, if it helps) that takes/offers a global network view for user authentication and access to resources. NDS (replaced Novell Directory Services) was its predecessor.

Objects are the building blocks of the eDirectory system. Those objects can be such things as O, OU, C, CN, Tree or [Root] (there can only be one tree/[root] in eDirectory, but multiples of all others). Tree objects are always at the top of the eDirectory structure. Primarily, the chief administrative component is a container -- the term used for any object that can hold other objects. A container can be a country, organization or another type of object. Leaf objects, on the other hand, are objects within eDirectory that do not contain any others. They are held within container objects and can be server objects, printer objects or anything similar. The schema is the portion of eDirectory that defines the type of objects that can be in the tree.

eDirectory offers object rights of: supervisor, browse, create, delete, rename and inheritable (SBCDRI). Property rights are: supervisor, read, compare, write, add/remove self and inheritable (SRCWAI). There are also file system rights, which can be modified and assigned as needed: supervisor, read, write, create, erase, modify, file scan and access control (SRWCEMFA). (The easiest way to remember this is to use the mnemonic “WARM FaCES.”) On top of this, inheriting can occur or be blocked, and “effective rights” are simply those that apply after any Inherited Rights Filtering has occurred. Inheritance occurs when rights flow down from a parent level to a child level. This can happen in the file directory structure as well as within eDirectory. IRFs (Inheritance Rights Filters) can be used to block the downward flow of rights from one level to another. Trustees are objects that are (explicitly) granted rights to files or directories.

Put all of this together and you can see that a great deal of granularity exists with NetWare security. Be prepared for questions that’ll require you to factor in more than one set of rights/permissions to satisfy a requirement. It’s also important not to forget the basics of general network security such as firewalls (which can, and should, be implemented on all networks connected to the Internet). Two common methods are circuit filtering and packet filtering. Circuit level firewalls, or gateways, focus only on source and destination addresses and do not look at upper-level concerns.

TIP: Universal passwords are possible but are disabled by default in NetWare 6.5. When enabled, they let you integrate multiple passwords into a single entity.

NetWare Tools
There are a number of tools that you use as a NetWare administrator, starting with Deployment Manager (Nwdeploy.exe). This tool is used to prepare the network for installation as well as manage the upgrade options and run a number of validation checks after the installation has completed. Once it’s done, ConsoleOne is a Java-based utility that can be used to manage eDirectory objects, schema, partitions and replicas from a browser. iManager is a Web-based application that can be used for managing, maintaining and troubleshooting eDirectory from within your browser interface. It can also be used to create DNS and DHCP settings as well as almost any administrative task related to these services. A companion to it, iMonitor, offers you monitoring and diagnostic capability from within a Web browser to all servers in your eDirectory tree. NetWare Administrator (Nwadmin32.exe) is a Windows-based tool that can be used to work with files (create, rename, move, etc.) and work with printing and licensing. Remote Manager gives you all the functionality that would be available at the server console within a Web browser and replaces the NetWare Management Portal that existed in earlier versions.

TIP: OpenSSH is an open source shell that can be used in place of less secure utilities to access the server and run other commands to access files and run commands remotely.

If you, as an administrator, like working with (or are more comfortable with) the older utilities, Filer has been around since the early days of NetWare and it allows many file-related operations to be done from the workstation. Flag is another workstation-based utility that’s existed for quite some time and it shows the attributes that apply to a file or directory. NCOPY is an old NetWare utility that has survived many versions of the network operating system and is used to copy files from one directory (or location) to another. NDIR is a workstation-based utility that can be used to see rights, attributes, IRFs and time-related information on files, directories and volumes.

TIP: Even if you don’t like working from the command line and don’t imagine you ever will, Novell still expects CNA candidates to know their command-line tools -- and how to use them.

From a user’s perspective, the tools that help them include iFolder, which can be used by a mobile user to access personal files without having to be connected to the network, while iPrint lets users print from any location to an iPrint-enabled printer over an encryption-secured connection. It mixes NDPS and IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) to create as simplistic an environment for the user as possible.

Configuration Files
As with any operating system, there are a few configuration files to know. In NetWare lingo, map statements are used to create drive mappings. At any workstation, you can enter the command map to see what the current drive mappings are. Net.cfg is an ASCII file that configures Preferred Server, Preferred Tree, Frame Type and Name Context information for the client.

Server.exe, located in the NWSERVER directory, is the executable file that truly is the NetWare network operating system. Without this file, there is no NetWare. Another executable to know is Setupnw.exe, which is the utility used to configure the Novell Client for NetWare 6.5. SCRSAVER is the screensaver used by NetWare 6.5.

In the world of acronyms, Novell Native File Access Protocols (NFAP) work with standards-based protocols including (but not limited to) NetWare Core Protocol (NCP), Common Internet File System (CIFS) and Network File System (NFS). NMAS is the Novell Modular Authentication Service, which allows you to choose the authentication (login sequence) you want to use.

Features
Other features of NetWare include file versioning, used to return a file to an earlier version after a problem has occurred (which is possible due to the journaling that NetWare employs). Hot fixing creates an area of redirection it uses when bad blocks are found (the default settings automatically set aside 2 percent of the volume’s disk space to be used for this redirection). NCS (Novell cluster services) is a high-availability clustering solution that’s tightly integrated with eDirectory. It allows you to configure a number of NetWare servers as a single multimode cluster with support for both shared SCSI devices and Fiber Channel SANs. Within the cluster, network resources can be dynamically transferred from server to server, and there’s support for failover, failback and load balancing. NetStorage provides Internet-based access to file storage, including access to iFolder.

The journaling, mentioned above, is accomplished through Novell Storage Services. NSS volumes are not only journaling, but they provide a great alternative to traditional volumes. They use only a small amount of server RAM and can have an unlimited number of volumes. They can be created using a number of utilities, including ConsoleOne and Remote Manager. Traditional volumes are tied to physical disk space and may include more than one physical disk but not more than eight.

Novell also expects its CNA 6.5 candidates to know AMP is a set of open source technologies (Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) that developers can use to create applications that are Web-accessible, scalable and secure. Virtual Office is a new tool that can be used for collaboration by providing Web-based portal desktops to resources such as calendars and discussion groups. A subset of Virtual Office is Virtual Teams, which is used for team creation, project planning and similar tasks. Additionally, NDPS (Novell Distributed Print Services) can run on IP or IPX; the four components of it are: Broker, Manager, Agent and Gateway. One of these components -- the NDPS Manager (Ndpsm.nlm) -- can only be loaded one time on the server and is the eDirectory manager for the printer agents.

TIP: The default IP frame type for NetWare 6.5 is Ethernet_II, while the default IPX frame type is Ethernet_802.2. More information on frame types (all you want to know) can be found here.

Closing Thoughts
If you have administrative experience with NetWare 6.5 and can easily give snippets on each of the items that appear in this article, you should have no difficulty passing this exam. And once you’ve become a CNA, you’ll be well on your way toward additional Novell/NetWare certifications. Good luck!