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NTP Software Quota & File Sentinel FAQ

Yes. All NTP Software products have been tested with the Windows 2000 operating system. Quota & File Sentinel is compatible with Windows 2000.

Quota & File Sentinel's install does the work for you! Run setup.exe from the CD-ROM that came with your Full Media Kit and select the update option. Enter the product serial number provided in the kit when prompted for it and accept all of the default entries for all of the other prompts. Quota & File Sentinel insures that your previously entered information is maintained.

Evaluation software may only be installed once per machine. Reinstallation attempts will prompt you for a product serial number. To obtain a serial number, please contact an NTP Software representative at 800 226-2755 (outside the US at 603 641-6937).

What is the relationship between EASE and Quota & File Sentinel? EASE provides a working shell for Quota & File Sentinel (and other NTP Software products) that defines the hierarchy of your environment. EASE drives how the machines talk to each other and update each other with appropriate information. Examples of some appropriate information exchanged would be template configuration changes, quota changes, updates required between machines after a communications failure (downed machine, routing issues), etc. Quota & File Sentinel requires EASE to run. So it checks for EASE during installation and installs it if it not already on your machine.

The EASE service accounts enable Quota & File Sentinel (QFS) to access remote machines for things like remote QFS installations, configuration changes, and updating new and changed templates. Because of this, the account under which the EASE service is running must be an administrator on the target (remote) machine. As with any enterprise-level application, Quota & File Sentinel servers need to communicate with each other through an NT security context that is valid to all nodes in the EASE hierarchy. Quota & File Sentinel works within the established NT security environment rather than creating an additional user management system to be administered.

Quota & File Sentinel with EASE can be used with any NT domain model (single, master, multiple-master, complete trust) or with a hybrid model assuming that the service account specified during installation of all Quota & File Sentinel servers is consistent.

It is recommended that the EASE component of Quota & File Sentinel be installed to use a service account created in a master domain within the NT domain infrastructure. Once the initial Quota & File Sentinel application is installed, subsequent installations of Quota & File Sentinel onto other machines should reference that same account as the service account for that server.

EASE comes ready for you to configure, as NTP Software doesn't want to assume any of your security needs. Adding security to your EASE environment is as easy as going to the root container and right clicking to select Add New Property. Under the name field, add one of the following:

allow read - for read access only
allow write - for write access
allow create children - to create containers

For the value field, put in the account you wish to grant these rights to. Remember to prefix the account name with the domain name, (e.g., Paris\administrator). If you want all three rights, you must perform the above steps 3 times - once for each right. This will enable basic security.

At this point, it gets a bit more complex so you will want to reference the documentation. Remember that to prevent non-administrators from altering Quota & File Sentinel items, you need to configure EASE security. EASE allows full access to everyone by default, so EASE security MUST be applied to prevent arbitrary users from altering application settings.

The first time you open the Quota & File Sentinel Admin, EASE creates some of the items needed for administering Quota & File Sentinel on that machine. This may initially delay the first opening of the Admin as it is going through this creation process.

Quota & File Sentinel relies on the EASE service to do some of its work. If the EASE service is stopped for any reason while the Quota & File Sentinel service is still running, Quota & File Sentinel will restart the EASE service so that it can continue with its work. To stop the EASE service you would need to first stop the Quota & File Sentinel service.

During remote installation, the installer must specify an existing service account for Quota & File Sentinel. If the specified account does not already exist on the remote machine, the remote installation cannot create the new service account. Since the remote installation process cannot create it, the service is automatically assigned to the system account and the installation process sets the service to start manually. It is not likely that the password specified is the same as the remote computer's service account password. Because the remote installation process will not catch the error, attempts to start the Quota & File Sentinel service will fail due to a bad password and you will receive an Error 1067, login failure. The solution is to specify a valid account with administrator rights on the remote machine. If the remote machine is a member of the domain, specify a domain account (e.g., DOMAIN1\QSAcct). If it is not a member of the domain, make sure that there is a trusted account or a locally created account.

Replication of the configuration information among servers is handled by EASE. If you encounter a replication failure, it could be that EASE was installed incorrectly and that the EASE service accounts among the various machines are not the same.

The Quota & File Sentinel service must update the file system filter driver for the new messages to take effect. This is done automatically every 20 minutes. Once that has taken place, the messages should be synchronized properly.

Quota & File Sentinel can deliver messages to Windows® 98, Windows® 95 and Windows for Workgroups client machines by using the Windows pop-up messaging system. It can also deliver messages to Windows NT client machines by using the Windows NT Messaging Service. You may configure Quota & File Sentinel owner, user and administrator (other recipient) messages in the threshold tabs in the template dialogs. Complete instructions for configuring Windows Pop-Up messaging and Windows NT Messaging Service are included in the Quota & File Sentinel documentation.

Your Windows NT environment is the thing that limits the number of quotas that can be placed on a single server. Limiting factors include bandwidth on the network, RAM on the server and server processor speed.

Yes. Please make sure to follow your Quota & File Sentinel Installation and User's Guide for step-by-step installation and configuration directions.

Quota & File Sentinel administration for clusters is handled at the container level of the EASE tree. Each cluster server's configuration settings should be defined at the container level to insure that regardless of which computer is managing the storage resource the settings are enforced on the resource. Quota & File Sentinel needs to be installed on each of the cluster servers and added to the EASE container.

Quota & File Sentinel follows Microsoft's clustering protocol in cases of fail-over. Quotas should be applied to directory paths rather than shares. This will better insure that your quota information will remain intact during both fail-over and fail-back.

Quota & File Sentinel can manage any file system that is mounted as a normal NT disk resource. If the NT Disk Administrator sees the array as a local drive, Quota & File Sentinel has the ability to enforce quotas there.

Yes. Quota & File Sentinel automatically includes all users in every new policy created. As the administrator, you can choose what user groups will be effected by the new policy. All users (except for those members of groups exempted from enforcement) are automatically blocked from WRITE actions when a limit on an object has been reached. If the new user is part of a user group subject to a policy, the new member will automatically be subject to the limits in a policy.

Quota & File Sentinel permits multiple policies on an object. Therefore, you can easily define policies with limits on subdirectories and define a policy to control the directory as a whole.

Users and Owners have similar NT and QFS definitions.

	NT	QFS
Owner	Any user who is specified as the NT owner of an object (file or directory); every file and directory on an NT server has an owner	Any user who is specified as the NT owner of an object (file or directory); every file and directory on an NT server has an owner
User	Any person logged in to the network	Any person logged in to the network that triggers a Quota & File Sentinel action.

If enforcement of a threshold level is enabled, Quota & File Sentinel checks the size of the file against the available space before it begins to WRITE the file. If there is enough space, it proceeds to let you WRITE. If there is not enough space, it will block the WRITE.

An Error 1069 usually means that Quota & File Sentinel and/or NT believes the Service Account has the wrong password. Go into Control Panel/Services/Quota & File Sentinel/Service/Startup and re-enter the password for the service account to remedy this.

In non-English language versions of NT, group lists may be named differently. Both EASE and Quota & File Sentinel accounts must be assigned to specific groups.

The EASE service account created during the installation process needs to be added to the global 'Domain Admins' group list. If you receive the error:

Group \Domain Admins does not exist.

... then you need to run the User Manager for Domains on your server and place the EASE service account ID into the global 'Domain Admins' group name that is appropriate for your language

The installation also creates a local group named 'EASE Services', and it places the EASE service account ID into it. The EASE service account is assigned the following user rights:

Log on as a service

The Quota & File Sentinel service account that is created during the installation process needs to be added to the local 'Administrators' group list. If you receive the error:

     Group \Administrators does not exist.

... then you must run the User Manager for Domains on your server and place the Quota & File Sentinel service account into the local 'Administrators' group name that is appropriate for your language. The Quota & File Sentinel service account ID is also placed into the EASE Services group list and is assigned the following user rights:

• Log on as a Service
• Take Ownership Privilege
• Backup Privilege
• Restore Privilege

If you are running non-English versions of Windows NT, you will need to make sure that the Quota & File Sentinel service account is in the correct group lists or the service will not start.

Windows NT and Windows 2000 treat administrators in a special way. When an administrator writes a file, the local Administrators group, not the individual login name, takes ownership of that file. To include all local Administrators in your domain, add the \Administrators group list to the "Managed Users & Groups" tab of the policy.

Macintosh security is very different from Windows NT security. The way Microsoft provides for Macintosh security on a Windows NT share is to store the security information in a file inside the volume/directory it applies to. Quota & File Sentinel uses filter driver technology to block prohibited file writes at the processor level. Security properties for the object itself are never touched or changed, so user access to Macintosh volumes is unaffected by Quota & File Sentinel.