Getting to Know the SCANTREE Utility

Novell's SCANTREE utility is a DOS-based utility that can help you determine whether your company's Novell Directory Services (NDS) tree is designed properly. When you run the SCANTREE utility, it analyzes the NDS tree and then provides a set of statistics about this tree. These statistics can provide information such as how wide and deep the NDS tree is and what type of leaf objects reside in this tree.

You can download the SCANTREE utility from the Novell Support Connection World-Wide Web site. (Select the File Finder option in the toolbar, type SCANDS.EXE in the Enter Filename field, and click the Find button.) You can then analyze your company's NDS tree by completing the following steps:

1. Log in to the network as the ADMIN user or an ADMIN-equivalent user from any workstation that meets the follow-ing hardware and software requirements:

2. Map a search drive to the SYS:\PUBLIC\NLS directory on the server that holds the NDS tree you want to scan.

3. Copy the SCANDS.EXE file to the workstation, and run this file.

4. Enter one or more of the following SCANTREE options at the command line:

SCANTREE/? This option displays a context-sensitive help screen for the SCANTREE utility.

SCANTREE/users This option prompts the SCANTREE utility to return statistics about User objects in the NDS tree. For example, the SCANTREE utility pro- vides information such as the number of User objects in the NDS tree and the number of attributes each User object has.

SCANTREE/d This option prompts the SCANTREE utility to return statistics about the logical hierarchy of all container and leaf objects in the NDS tree.

5. If you want the SCANTREE utility to generate a log file for these statistics, enter the following command at the command line:

SCANTREE > tree.log

The SCANTREE utility can also generate a log file that contains statistics about only User objects. To view these statistics, enter the following command at the command line:

SCANTREE/users > tree.log

You can then open these log files to view or print the statistics gathered by the SCANTREE utility.

As the SCANTREE utility gathers statistics about the NDS tree, this utility writes all statistics about container objects to temporary files called SCANTREE.nnn. These temporary files reduce the possibility that the workstation will run out of memory when the SCANTREE utility is analyzing a large NDS tree that holds many container objects.