Supervising the Network

7-19
Maintaining the NetWare Server
Managing the Server
Managing Engines at the Desktop
NetWare Services servers refer to certain processes as NCP engines. NCP
engines are often considered the workhorses of NetWare Services servers
and are responsible for initial processing of all client requests.
NetWare Services requires a minimum of two engines running at all times.
The more work you require of your system, the more engines you will need
to start.
Adding too many engines, however, may decrease performance. So
generally you need two engines per CPU.
Running more engines requires more RAM. (See “Hardware Requirements”
on page vii in “How to Use This Manual.”) After the NetWare server has
booted, engines can be increased or decreased using the nwengine utility.
The number should be increased if the nxinfo utility reports an excessive
number of packets dropped because of server activity.
To prevent NetWare from using too many resources, you can limit the
number of engines that can be started after boot time.
You can specify the number of NCP engines to start by using “Number of
NCP Engines to Start” and “Maximum Number of NCP Engines” at the
NetWare® 4.1/9000 server console. To specify how many engines to start
automatically when the NetWare server process is started, see “Tuning Your
Server at the Desktop” in this chapter.
Configuring Shared Memory
If you don’t configure any shared memory or if the default size of 4 Mg (or
4194304 bytes) is configured, NetWare will automatically determine the
required shared memory size. The actual size used will be displayed on the
console at startup.
Adjusting the Size of Your Error Log
Any errors your server experiences are saved to the error log file,
SYS$LOG.ERR. You can change the size of this log depending upon how
many messages you want to store in this file. Make sure you monitor this file
because if messages come in and the file is full, messages are saved to a
backup (SYS$LOG.OLD) and a new file, SYS$LOG.ERR, is created. Only
one SYS$LOG.ERR.OLD is maintained.