tutorial for disk management

In the above link, use the left panel to navigate to spefici management task you wish to learn about.

Lot more documentation can be found here
http://www.novell.com/documentation/a-z.html

thanks buddy for the links..
i was looking for a brief to the point material with screenshots possibly

http://www.samspublishing.com/articles/article.asp?p=337154&seqNum=9

If you tell us what version of NetWare you're interested in, and what you mean by disk management, we can be more specific.  

For instance, if you are interested in performance tuning, the version is very important, as is which filesystem you're using (traditional NFS or NSS)

If you are interested in controlling space usage, that is also dependent somewhat on what version of NetWare you're running, because the tools you'd use would differ.

If you are interested in SAN and clustering, that's another animal altogether.

If you are interested in how to manage a software-based mirrored and/or duplexed pair of disk drives, thats yet another thing.

If you go to the appnotes page, you can follow the links to the archives on developer.novell.com and look at the cumulative index.  Where you look depends on what you're looking for.  For instance, if you want notes on how to tune NSS, you wouldn't look under "D" for disk, you'd look under NO-NZ for NSS or Novell Storage Services.

One thing I didn't mention - if you're looking for filesystem access rights management and concepts, that's yet another thing.

Minor correction, I said "traditional NFS" and should have said "traditional NWFS" - so as not to confuse it with the *nix NFS network file access protocols tbat allow remote-mounting of filesystem devices across a network link.

thanks for the pointers friends..
i have to conduct a small presentation that will help my team members understand storage concepts on various operating systems.
being associated with computers, i could manage to get dos/windows and unices along quite well.

with these topics i can handle board and diagrams well on my own. but i wanted some screenshots so that i can include them to reduce risk of feeling a bore PIA.
:-)

let me see if the appnotes give me nething..

Do me a favor and please try not to use obsolete versions of NetWare for your examples?  NetWare 6.5/NSS does SAN and FC quite nicely, and isn't limited to software mirroring like NW 3.x was.  Thanx.

One more little note you might want to add is that the next-generation OS offering from Novell - Open Enterprise Server - has ported the NSS filesystem to SLES 9, along with its dynamic inheritance (as opposed to the traditional *nix ACL filesystem rights).

Do us ALL a favor and please use modern NetWare versions and capabilities in your presentation. See http://www.novell.com/documentation/nw65/stor_ovw/data/a7hjvxo.html

Modern NetWare (v6.5) supports filesystems in a wide variety of ways. Some points which I think are key:

1) The two filesystems that NetWare uses internally are its "Traditional FAT" filesystem (the lineage of which can be traced all the way back to NetWare v2), which modern NetWare continues to support in a legacy fashion; and Novell Storage Services (NSS), introduced around NetWare v5 and which is much faster and more flexible than the older FAT filesystem. Both are journaled filesystems and support rollback, much like jfs in the *NIX environment. NSS supports up to 8 TB of storage per pool. See http://www.novell.com/documentation/nw65/index.html?page=/documentation/nw65/nss_enu/data/hn0r5fzo.html#bktitle

2) NetWare can present its storage in a variety of ways, using Native File Access Protocols (NFAP). A NetWare server can present its storage as if it were a *NIX NFS server, a Mac AppleShare server, or a Windoze CIFS box. This is in addition to the NetWare Core Protocol (NCP) view found via the Novell Client 32 packages for Windoze and Mac. So that's 4 different "faces" that the NetWare server can use to present the same storage.

3) NetWare can be an iSCSI target or initiator; as a target, that makes a 5th "face" for presenting storage it hosts.

4) NetWare supports FTP and SecureFTP (subsystem of OpenSSH, which ships with NetWare v6.5). iFolder and NetDrive are two other file access methods supported by NetWare, out of the box.

5) NetWare supports RAID to whatever extent the hardware manufacturer does, and beyond that, supports mirroring and duplexing in software. Around the release of W2K, M$ claimed that NetWare did not support RAID: it was a bald-faced lie (and fairly typical of Redmond - they're much better liars than they are coders).

6) NetWare supports clustering out-of-the-box, using shared storage (SAN, NAS, whatever). NetWare is capable of mounting disk and making it available to clients in a matter of seconds.

General "best practice" advice when configuring storage in the modern NetWare environment:

A) Much as there is always a / partition for *NIX and a C: for Windoze, there is always a SYS: Volume for a NetWare server. And just like / (or /var) or C:, it is critical that the SYS: Volume has sufficient storage allocated, and that users/user processes are not allowed to run SYS: out of space. Most modern NetWare installations use the NSS filesystem type for SYS:; this is fine, but care should be taken to place the SYS: Volume in its own storage pool, to avoid the possibility of other Volumes consuming the pool and running SYS: out of space (this can also be accomplished using Volume Quotas in NSS, but giving SYS: its own pool insures it never has to compete for space and is a better, IMHO, solution). User file storage should *never* be placed on the SYS: Volume. Add-on products like E-Mail systems, webservers, database servers, etc. should be configured to use other Volumes for storage of data and logs.

B) NetWare can boot to DOS, and then use DOS as a program loader to load and execute the server program; NetWare does NOT "run under" DOS (a favorite lie of the 'softies). Frankly, Windoze still does the same thing, it just hides it better. Modern NetWare can "boot to NetWare", where the fact that DOS is being used as a bootloader is hidden like Windoze does. The NetWare install will offer a choice (and choices are something you can expect to never get from Redmond). Frankly, I prefer having a healthy DOS partition I can boot to for hardware diagnostics and troubleshooting, so I usually install my own DOS and then tell NetWare not to mess with it (more steps for me, but then I have a consistent set of tools available across the servers).

C) On filesystems that have a lot of temporary files (for example, filesystems providing storage for E-Mail systems), be sure to enable Purge Immediate in the appropriate directory structures, or even Volume-wide.

I'm sure other Experts will chime in with similar bits of advice - these are just the things I can think of offhand which I think belong in a technical presentation of NetWare's file system capabilities and best practices.

That brings up another nifty thing about NSS - shared storage pools.  NSS storage is defined by pool, not by device, and volumes are assigned to pools.  NSS pools also support a lot of the current buzzword storage technologies like snapshot and migration.