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Networking Admin
Disk formats and protocols

by Mark Huckabee

Here is a question for those of you looking to hire NT administrators. This question will help you distinguish between Intermediate and Advanced level NT Administrators. Senior-level NT Administrators should get this question right. This question is an example of how you can incorporate diagrams to help explain a situation or problem for the candidate to solve. As you can imagine, problem-solving abilities are very important in networking.



In the situation depicted above the older Netware servers are being phased out. Files and folders on these servers are being transferred to the NT server however the files are very sensitive and all permissions must be retained. You are using the Migration Tool for NetWare to transfer the files and folders.

What combinations of disk formats and protocols should be present on the NT server for this to work optimally?


What to look for in your candidate's response:

NTFS and NWLink disk formats and protocols should be present for the NT server to work optimally. Migrating files and folders from older NetWare servers to Windows NT using the Migration Tool for NetWare requires that the NT server run the NWLink protocol. In order to keep all file and folder permissions the partition on the Windows NT server must be formatted as NTFS.

This question can tell a lot about the candidate's abilities. Most NT server installations do not require NWLink because no Netware servers are present or because the Netware servers are running version 5 (which now supports TCP/IP). Senior administrators should be familiar with these protocols and know that the migration tool can only use NWLink. Even novice administrators should know that FAT does not support file permissions. Intermediate administrators with minor exposure to Unix might mention NFS and NWLink or NFS and TCP/IP without knowing that NFS is not supported on NT disks. There is an NFS service for NT however this is not a disk format. Since you asked for the optimal solution only NTFS and NWLink would be the correct answer.


About the author

Mark Huckabee is an MCSE, Oracle DBA and PM with more than 15 years experience. He has administered networks involving NT, Netware, and Unix servers and now serves as AVP, Software Engineering for a multi-billion dollar consulting firm leading the design and implementation of complex bioinformatics systems.

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