sfConsole 2009
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Key benefits:- web-enabled access to the remote and local NetWare console |
"It's just comforting to know that I can securely monitor all the servers on the network from school or from home. With sfConsole I can easily keep on top of my servers and be a little more proactive than reactive."
Robert Daczewitz
District Technology Officer
Spearfish School District, South Dakota, USA
Customer Background
The Spearfish School District, located in the Lawrence County, South Dakota, is a 12K school system employing over 300 people and providing education to 2,500 students. Spearfish schools are renowned for outstanding educational accomplishments; in 2000, the District received the "Gold Medal" award by Expansion Management Magazine.
The District authorities set great store by modeling the educational program to achieve the mission statement "Empowering all students to succeed in a changing world." The cornerstone of the Schools' strategy is the commitment to learn, use and integrate technology into the curriculum. In 1999, the District joined Learning Organizations for Technology Integration (LOFTI), whose goal, among others, is to utilize technology as a transparent teaching tool and to build a system "essential for reaching a level of technology infusion that impacts the roles of all district stakeholders and effectively enhances student achievement."
The Challenge
In view of the above, the District IT infrastructure plays a crucial role in realizing the Spearfish vision of the 21st century school; it provides critical applications, Internet and intranet to enable students, parents, staff and interns to communicate and collaborate in classroom instruction and District administration. The Spearfish network consists of one Windows 2000 server and 12 NetWare 6 servers, all dispersed across 5 locations and connected with a fiber backbone.
Challenged to build and maintain a reliable and high performance network all by himself, District Technology Officer Robert Daczewitz was looking for the way to remotely monitor and control his servers from home or another central point of administration. The idea was to reduce the time and money spent driving to remote sites to access the physical server console for maintenance and troubleshooting tasks.
Additional consideration for Daczewitz was security of remote and local access to the NetWare console. Despite the fact that the schools' NetWare infrastructure could boast an excellent security record, with Novell RConsole and RConsoleJ used for accessing the servers, he couldn't guarantee the confidentiality of the schools' data and resources.
The AdRem Solution
The District opted for AdRem sfConsole 5.0 - the tool recommended by many Novell experts and popular in the NetWare community. The solution from AdRem was remotely installed in a few hours on all 12 District machines with no technical glitches. Robert Daczewitz explains: "I've got the servers in racks, so once I deployed sfConsole, it was easy to monitor them from one work station rather than going to the local monitor."
For Daczewitz, the chief reason for adopting sfConsole was the Web access. "Web access was the big thing I was looking for. I like to keep track of my servers and run back ups remotely from home. The Web access gave me good opportunity to do that."
The web functionality of sfConsole didn't require the Spearfish administrator to install sfConsole and NetWare clients on the workstation. This means that all he needs to do to access the server over the web is just open Internet Explorer and type in the server's IP address. By taking advantage of the directory-enabled Web access feature of sfConsole, Daczewitz can benefit from all of sfConsole's functionality. For example, he can remotely work on multiple program and console screens at a time, or connect to the NetWare console and transfer files to the server even when eDirectory is down.
As a result, sfConsole saved him "a lot of running back and forth between this location and another location. Now I'm able to monitor and do some of the stuff remotely. That's especially one of the reasons why I like the web access part of the program so much - I can then decide when and where I need to start the day, or if I need to go in and do some work in the evening or weekend. I can check a server to see if there's any need for me to go to a site, whether it involves going from home to the office or from building to building. It's just been real helpful to monitor all my servers remotely."
Exactly estimating the percentage of time saved on daily server console management by using sfConsole was rather difficult: "I don't know how I could estimate that because I never tried to measure that in any way. What I know is that I don't have to run back and forth like I used to. One thing about our NetWare environment is that it's pretty stable. So it's not like I've had to find servers that have abended or having a problem constantly. But I still like to use sfConsole to monitor everything that's going on, look for problems, and try to head them off before they become real issues. I was using the NetWare consoles to do this before, but I found sfConsole to be more user-friendly and useful. It's just comforting to know that I can securely monitor all the servers on the network from school or from home. With sfConsole I can easily keep on top of my servers and be a little more proactive than reactive."
Unlike the Novell consoles AdRem sfConsole delivers advanced encryption and full integration with eDirectory. Therefore, it is not surprising that Daczewitz stressed the security aspect of the tool. "We weren't using any 3rd party console, just RConsole and Java-Based RConsoleJ before sfConsole. So we didn't really have any security to the console. Security is always a concern, so even if we really haven't had any issues, it's always better to be safe than sorry."
Conclusion
When asked whether sfConsole delivered enough value for the money, Daczewitz said: "Price is always an issue, and we being in the school environment don't have a lot of cash. With our IT budget, the price of sfConsole was a bit on the high side, but we've really used the product to improve processes and reduce costs. Therefore, I would whole-heartedly recommend this AdRem product to other NetWare administrators."
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