00135: The Bindery vs. Directory Services

Title:

The Bindery vs. Directory Services

Description:

BBxPROGRESSION/4 and PRO/5 store information in the Novell file server’s common database, called the “bindery,” as a way of tracking the use of the license. If it detects the same serial number installed on more than one machine, or more than the prescribed number of users using any one copy, it signals an error, typically, FSLoad Error 70. 

All of this worked until NetWare 4. The trouble with NetWare 4 isn’t so much that it’s bad or broken, it’s just not as compatible with NetWare 3 as we would like. With NetWare 4 there is an exciting new feature called Directory Services, which is a self-maintaining, global network database. It’s far more sophisticated and generally more useful than the bindery, though it’s hard to use from the programmer’s point of view. Nonetheless, it works. 

The problem is that Directory Services is a replacement for the bindery. The bindery doesn’t even exist under NetWare 4. You can enable ‘bindery emulation’ for compatibility, but it’s not the same thing. 

Under NetWare 3, each file server has its own bindery, each with independent contents. Under NetWare 4, the emulated bindery appears the same no matter which server you use to access it. This causes BBx to think it sees the same serial number installed on multiple machines, if you have more than one NetWare 4 server (which is commonplace). 

Many NetWare 4 customers prefer not to use bindery emulation at all because it takes up memory on the server, but BBx/4 depends on the bindery to look up print queues by name and to get user information for the INFO functions. 

Further, our attempt to determine what other installations are on a network caused timeouts in some cases, where servers which are reported to us as being up but are really down. 

Temporary Workaround: 
A popular trick is to assign each server its own “bindery context”. At the console you type: 

         SET BINDERY CONTEXT = <something>. 

As long as each server has its own context, the emulated binderies will be unique and BBx’s serial number detection won’t be fooled. 

This trick is only practical if you don’t depend on the bindery for other things. The new NetWare drivers tend to use Directory Services instead of the bindery, so you should be okay unless you’re using older drivers. (The stock Windows 95 NetWare drivers rely on the bindery, but both Microsoft and Novell have beta versions of newer drivers available.) 

Resolution:

Upgrade to rev BBx4 2.4 or PRO/5 1.01 or later. 

Last Modified: 12/19/1997 Product: PRO/5 Operating System: Novell Error Number:FSLOAD 70

BASIS structures five components of their technology into the BBx Generations.