Feb 00 NetManage
Volume Number: 16
Issue Number: 2
Column Tag: Network Management
netOctopus 3.5
by John C. Welch
Reviewing the premier Network Management
Application for the Mac OS
Disclaimer
I have been a netOctopus customer for almost 2 years, and have been more than a little
pleased with the product, and most definitely with the programmers and support staff
who have followed the product across its last three owners to its current home at
Netopia. I was also involved in the 3.5 beta program, most heavily with the SNMP
features. As a thank you for my help and work, Netopia gave me a free copy of one of
the program modules that would normally be a purchased product. Having disclosed
this, on with the review.
netOctopus is a network and computer management application that allows you to
monitor and control various hardware devices on your network. netOctopus, also
allows you to manage the configurations of both the operating system and applications
for Windows NT and 95/98 PCs, and Macintoshes on your network. By using the SNMP
(Simple Network Management Protocol) management addition, netOctopus can also
monitor, and help manage almost any device that supports the SNMP protocol,
including Unix workstations, printers, routers, hubs, or even uninterrupted power
supplies (UPS). netOctopus operates across TCP/IP, NetWare, and AppleTalk
networks, and can run any one or all of those protocols. netOctopus runs as both a
server and a client, and either part runs on both 32-bit Windows and Mac OS
platforms. Finally, netOctopus supports automation/scripting on both platforms,
AppleScript on the Mac OS, and Visual Basic on Windows. For this review, I will
concentrate on a Mac OS server with both Mac OS and Windows clients, and the SNMP
add-on.
Installation
Installation of the netOctopus administrator is fairly straightforward, with the usual
choices between Easy and Custom installs. You can choose either the default location at
the root of your startup disk, or a specified folder. If you choose easy install , then the
Administrator, File Scripter utility, client updates, and template files are installed to
the default location, unless you don't specify a different location. There are also a
number of shared libraries placed into the Extensions folder, along with the Mac OS
NetWare client. If a custom install is picked, then you can choose the type of
administrator you wish, either 'flavored' or standard. (Flavored is a special install
package that is used only with flavored clients for certain situations. For 99% of you,
the standard administrator is what you want.) In version 3.5, the administrator is
PowerPC only, so if you plan to upgrade an existing installation that's running on a
68K Mac, its time to upgrade the server Mac. The File Scripter utility is still either
68K, PowerPC -native, or Fat and you can choose which version. This is also the
install to use if you don't want to have the NetWare client installed on your Mac.
Finally, you can also choose whether to install the client updates. Other installed
options include some default AppleScripts, and a series of scripts and installer
documents that allow you to perform remote installations of the Mac OS, versions 8.5
and greater. (Since 8.5 is the first version of the Mac OS that doesn't require multiple
human interventions once you start the install, this is the first version that can be
supported practically .) Once the options are chosen, the installer runs, and you can
either install more options, quit, or restart the server. Since you have to restart for
the netOctopus libraries to load, you'll have to do this before you can set up the server.
One of the things I appreciated about the install procedure is that you are not forced to
do a restart. Since this is the type of application that will probably be running on an
existing server, casually forcing you to reboot is not the kind of behavior that is
conducive to happy networks, servers, users, or administrators.
Administrator Setup
The basic setup is decent enough for most, but there are some quibbles. For one thing,
Netopia follows the common practice of setting the default memory allocation to the
minimum needed to run the application. I had to double it to get things to a usable level