NetWare Directory Services

7-21
Planning NetWare Directory Services Implementation
Developing a Replication Strategy
Read-only replicas do not support user login. Do not create a read-only
replica of a partition that users must attach to before they authenticate to the
network.
With a replica of a distant partition stored locally, users have immediate
access to the objects they need. The only time Directory information crosses
the link is when replicas are being updated.
However, remember that every server that carries a replica must receive all
changes to any object within that partition. The more replicas of a given
partition you have, the more time needed and the more WAN traffic that
exists to fully synchronize the replicas.
Before you begin distributing replicas, think about how much data you want
in a partition. Because replicas are stored on servers, unnecessary
information in a replica is an inefficient use of disk space and network
traffic.
If a partition becomes very large, and you only need to replicate a portion of
it, you can use utilities to split the partition and replicate only the necessary
portion.
The following figure shows one way to distribute replicas across the WAN
on our example tree.