Storing photos in eDirectory
Novell Cool Solutions: Question & Answer
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Q:
What about storing user photos in eDirectory - is that possible? Pro's and con's?
A:
You can store photo or even applications in NDS - it doesn't really care. The trick is to use an attribute whose syntax is defined as STREAMS (aka a "file"). But the issue is replication overhead. Many moons ago when Novell first released the NetWare Web Server, it allowed photo (JPEGs) to be stored as one of the user attributes. I've seen people start loading in giant JPEG files without thinking ahead, and replication was just killing their slower WAN links (back in the days of 512K being "fast") ...
Storing photos in eDirectory would add a lot to the replicated data, causing high synchronization load. If you were to do this, I would try to keep the photos on only one partition in a far corner of the tree to keep it away from the rest or the replica ring. It's better though to store the photos somewhere in a file system and maybe store the path in eDirectory.
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