Supervising the Network

4-5
Managing the NetWare Directory Services Tree
Creating and Managing Directory Services Partitions
Creating and Managing Directory Services Partitions
This section explains how to set up NDS partitions and replicas on your
servers.
About Partitions and Replicas
A partition is a part of the total Directory tree and contains at least one
container and its associated leaf objects.
When a partition is subordinate to another in the Directory tree, it is referred
to as a child partition. The partition above it is referred to as the parent
partition.
You can make copies of a partition, called replicas, and store them on
different servers in your network. Distributing replicas reduces network
traffic by making information accessible locally and enabling users to log in
to the network even when a server is down.
Replicas also provide fault tolerance by ensuring that more than one copy of
the partition information is available. If the partition becomes corrupted, you
can use a replica to re-create it.
NOTE: Partitions contain only NDS database information, not file and directory data or
information.
There are four types of replicas, which are explained in the following table:
Replica Description
Master Partition information can be read from and
written to this replica. The master replica can also
be used to change the logical structure of the
Directory tree (by creating a new partition, for
example).
When you create a new partition, a master replica
is created and stored on the same server as the
parent partition.