IDM and How I learned to love Directory Services

2 months ago I spent some time in Dallas, TX. training on Novell's IDM solution. I've been supporting an IDM system since 2008, but only had training from the implementing consultant and what I could find on Novell.com.  Came back from the training with a new appreciation for what this software is capable of bringing in terms of value to any enterprise.

One of the best things to train up people, in my opinion, is by doing. Living by my own advice I built up a duplicate test environment resembling our production network, and use the edir2edir driver to mirror the users through the new environment. Some small tips arose from this, and it is worth it to put them down here.

Novell Designer for IDM : While the iManager IDM suite works quite well, the Designer from Novell is one of the best tools for dealing with the in's and out's of working with IDM. The ability to export your IDM as a backup is must have.

Apache Directory Studio : A must have for working with Directory Services, a very flexible and free tool from the Apache project. Platform neutral, it runs on most hardware.  I use it to look at the results of various "what if's?" as well as correcting issues.

Terminal, using SSH you can do many things, but the most helpful one was running "tail -f" on the idmtrace logs

Brave New World

Today was rather epic. We finally installed our first eDir 8.8.5 server in our tree. We did it on a SLES 11 64bit VM box. My GAWD it's fast. We are definitely on a fast track to OES2 after we upgrade our Identity Manager implementation. Replication times have fallen and several of our "issues" with eDir were resolved by this.

Last week I completed the 3091 IDM course. Great product, the shame of the training was that it was on 3.5.1 and we're moving to 3.6.1. Not a big deal in the scheme of things, and the course was very informative. This will make several of the projects currently in motion much easier.

Now I need to do a crash course in XML scripting and driver logic.