1.1 Overview

NSS provides a special administration volume—known as the admin volume—that exists on all servers. This volume uses no disk space and is created at startup time. Using VFS and the services provided by files that are created on the admin volume, your administrator can potentially control all server management functions.

On NetWare: At Novell, NSS uses VFS to create all of the files on the _Admin volume. Using VFS, the NSS team accepts commands and returns information dynamically. For example, they can use VFS to read a file that returns the statistics for cache buffer utilization. The contents of that file are generated in real time. They can also use files on the _Admin volume to control all of their storage management by sending XML commands and reading the resulting XML stream. Both ConsoleOne and NORM use this same method to handle their storage needs.

There are three basic virtual files provided with this release:

These files are predefined by NSS and support a predefined XML syntax for managing NSS with basic commands. Since they are predefined, these files cannot be deleted or created.

On Linux: At Novell, NSS uses VFS to create all of the files on the _admin volume. Using VFS, the NSS team accepts commands and returns information dynamically. For example, they can use VFS to read a file that returns the statistics for cache buffer utilization. The contents of that file are generated in real time. They can also use files on the _admin volume to control all of their storage management by sending XML commands and reading the resulting XML stream. Both ConsoleOne and NORM use this same method to handle their storage needs.

There are three basic virtual files provided with this release: