CommTech Industries, Inc. (CommTech) is a worldwide network consulting company. It manages the telecommunications and data needs of many Fortune 500 companies and is often brought in to troubleshoot complex networks and to design or upgrade major NetWare network installations.

CommTech's William Long, a network design engineer, specializes in casinos (large, heterogeneous networks with thousands of computers). When a casino experiences a problem, the loss of revenues per hour or day can be staggering. Consequently, the speed at which the cause of the problem is found and corrected is paramount. Typically, the time it takes to remedy a problem is based on the depth of information available about the network. On NetWare networks, eDirectory stores information about every resource object on the network in one place and presents the network as a single, integrated image, ensuring that the data is comprehensive and easy to find. However, because NetWare has no centralized reporting system that will identify object properties (such as users' login scripts, printer and queue assignments, and so on), getting complete information on a complex NetWare network takes a lot of time.

Long often spent days at his clients' offices looking for problems on their networks. To find the problems, he had to review huge amounts of information about a network's configuration from NWAdmin, Novell's eDirectory management utility, and copy the information by hand, as no reports could be generated directly from NWAdmin. This was extremely time consuming and added thousands of dollars to the price of his services. Long clearly needed a way to produce an easy-to-read printout of network configuration information so that he could return to his office and analyze it there, reducing the amount of time he spent onsite. And, Long needed to gather this information without taking the server down so that his client's employees could work uninterrupted.

Long also needed a reporting tool to help him when he designed and upgraded networks. Long's clients frequently requested reports about their new or upgraded network's configuration for reference and training and to facilitate network administration. Although a report could be generated by copying the information from NetWare configuration utilities and pasting it into separate documentation logs, this process was time consuming and did not produce a professional-looking report. Long began a search for a tool that could quickly produce presentation-quality reports about the configuration of the networks he installed and upgraded.

After investigating several eDirectory reporting tools, Long chose TGB's Report Generator to solve his documentation needs. He found that the Report Generator was the fastest, most comprehensive, and easiest to use of the reporting tools available. For example, Long used the Report Generator to solve the problems of a major client running a casino network with more than 2,500 computers and several file servers and WAN links. The network was operating extremely slowly, and users were being disconnected from the servers. Though several consulting firms had been called in, none had been able to discover the problems. Long arrived at the site with a notebook computer on which he had installed the Report Generator. He loaded the Report Generator NetWare Loadable Module™ on the client's file server and ran the program from the notebook. Capturing the configuration information took about thirty minutes and did not require downing the server. Long returned to his office the same day, formatted and printed the report, and immediately began reviewing the information to find the network's problems.

"We had the network back up and running at top speed within eight days, based on information I gathered through the Report Generator," Long reports. "They were doing quite a few things incorrectly. I'd say 90 percent of the information that I used to correct the problem came from the Report Generator."

The Report Generator also solved Long's secondary problem: documenting new and upgraded NetWare network installations. With Report Generator, Long no longer has to submit handwritten reports or reports produced by copying and pasting configuration information into separate logs. He is now able to present network administrators with a detailed, professional- looking document that contains all their network configuration information. Network administrators have told him that the reports he provides save them a great deal of time and money.

By using the Report Generator to quickly document the extensive configuration information contained in eDirectory, Long has dramatically cut the costs of troubleshooting a problem network. In fact, he says the price may actually be cut in half: "What used to take a week or more can now be done in two or three days. It also saves in expenses, because while I used to have to spend days at a site, now I can fly there, get the information, and fly back. I can do most of the work from my own office." And, he says, for the busy network administrator, a printed copy of the network configuration is invaluable. "This is absolutely the program that every administrator should have to provide current documentation of what's on the system."

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