SLP Advice - issues at WAS Site if link is off

[shazzypoos]

Hi

It's a while since I've done anything with SLP and I'm not even sure it is my issue so bear with me! Basically we are planning to continue to run Netware 6.5 SP8 for at least another 12 months before looking to move to OES2. We have all sites linked individually to our main site via 100Mb or Gig circuits. If a link to my main site goes down I want the satellite site to continue running (they will lose centrally located services such as Internet but should continue to log in, access ZEN and get h: drives etc).

I tested this yesterday as one link was down for maintenance and was surprised at how little worked! My LDAP contextless login stopped working, and ZEN would not load objects in NAL though you could get all drives if you logged in using a full context.

I have a server at each site which holds the master replica for the partition for the site and also holds a R/W of my ZEN container. I tried adding a replica of root after testing yesterday, incase the site could not find some reference it needed, then took the link offline again to test and it made no difference to LDAP or ZEN, they still would not work when not linked, when the link was reconnected - everything worked straight away.

My timesync and SLP run centrally, do I need to run a SLP DA at each WAN site to allow services to continue? I had read that Novell recommend just one central SLP DA but am wondering if this is what is causing me issues if a link goes off.

I need the sites to be able to continue as much as possible if a link were to go down (touch wood this would be a rare occurance but I need to prepare for it as we are about to take on 3 more sites). Not sure if it's SLP, replicas or something else I need to look at!

Any advice?

Thank you!