Banyan Administration

As part of the Terra Flora strategy to provide centralized network services, Terra Flora has installed Banyan Enterprise Client for Windows NT on all computers running Windows NT Server or Workstation that will be required to function as Banyan clients. Banyan servers cannot be directly administered. Instead as with NetWare and UNIX, server administration is performed on clients functioning as system consoles.

Installation of the Banyan Enterprise client for Windows NT allows the computer running Windows NT Server or Workstation to connect to the Banyan network as a system console. The system console has access to the administration tools on the Banyan server that allow the management of user accounts and other networking services.

When a computer running Windows NT Server or Workstation that will function as a Banyan client starts, the user supplies the same user account and password normally used to log on to Windows NT and is authenticated to the Windows NT network.

Logon to the Banyan server may be configured as automatic, which means that the configuration of the Banyan Enterprise client for Windows NT is set up so that authentication to the Banyan server is accomplished when the user supplies their user account and password for logging onto the Windows NT network. For information on installation and configuration of Banyan Enterprise Client for Windows NT on the on computers running Windows NT Server and Workstation, the section titled, "Windows NT Clients Authenticating to Banyan Servers," earlier in this chapter.

During Banyan logon, the redirector will map the system files volume to the default Z drive. The user can then select the administration tools they want to work with from drive Z.

From the DOS prompt, type Manage.com. Press enter. The Manage.com menu appears. From the menu, the user selects the type of administration that they want to do. See your Banyan documentation for details on the administration utilities available on the Manage.com menu. The screen shot of Manage.com below was captured on a computer running Windows NT Server connecting as a Banyan client to the Banyan server.

The first two menu options are the ones that we will focus on for the remainder of this section. Services (Mservice) allows the Banyan Administrator to administer the server using various services that can be specified on the menu. See your Banyan documentation for details on the use of Services options.

Services can be accessed in two ways.

The screen shot of MService below was captured on a computer running Windows NT connecting as a Banyan client to the Banyan server.

Option 2 on the Manage.com menu allows the user to administer user accounts on the Banyan server. For detailed instructions on how to use the User option, see your Banyan documentation.

There are two ways to access Users:

The screen shot of MUser below was captured on a computer running Windows NT connecting as a Banyan client to the Banyan environment.

Multiple sessions of the administration tools can be run on a single computer running Windows NT Workstation or Server acting as a client connected to a Banyan client. The information about each of the servers to which the client is connected will be displayed in a separate window on the client. This is a major benefit of using computers running Windows NT. The result is the ability to monitor all of the Banyan servers from one computer running Windows NT Workstation or Server acting as a system console. This feature also exists in a limited fashion on computers running Windows 95, but is not a feature that is available on computers running other operating systems such as MS-DOS.

The screen shot below displays multiple sessions of the administration tools running on one Windows NT client.