Slashdot Mirror
Novell Launches Anti-Win2k Campaign
skajohan writes "Is it time for Microsoft to taste some serious FUD themselves? Novell has launched an anti-Win2k campaign. Surprise, surprise, they'd rather see us run Netware. It starts out with a rebuttal of previous MS claims. This can get interesting." If MS and Novell were running against each other for political office, newspaper editorialists would be muttering about "negative advertising" and "smear campaigns." These companies are not playing nice with each other.
Those management dumbasses could have used the 690 and the SparcStations to get some trade-in value towards their Winblows 2000 systems, assuming of course they were buying them from HP or Compaq.
Of course, the 690MP's case would make a good fridge enclosure. Or you can use the rack to mount the Win2000 boxes.
May I say again, Fuck Microsoft.
Fuck Microsoft, Bill Gates is a eunich, Microsoft has rigor mortis, and Steve Ballmer can't save it, because it is Dead!
Oh you mean when Linux was proven to not be a fast scalable solution? Yes, it was quite a fiasco... for Linux. So I guess it wasn't FUD then, was it?
Ah, you're one of those newbies who didn't start using Netware until version 3.
There were dongles in Netware's past. Version 2 and before.
NT 4 does not support DMA. That's why they used PIO 4.
Currently the file and print part of Netware is limited to 1 CPU. Applications supports SMP, but who runs apps on Netware?
that's funny. I tried to buy 4.11 last year and was told that under no circumstances would Novell sell anything (not even ad licenses) except 5.x. I went to considerable lengths to convince a number of Novell account reps and none could help me.
First of all, the admin interface to Netware 4 and above is GUI. There is some text based stuff at the server console, but text based admin went out of style after Netware 3. Oh and Netware is definately not easier to use if you have Unix experience. Netware has nothing in common with Unix. On the other hand NT has quite a bit in common. You're correct on the other points. A large part of the reason companies moved to NT was because it's a lot simpler to support a common solution if you can. This decision was made easier by more third party product supporting NT than Netware. The term FUD has in itself become FUD. And the only thing Linux is replacing is old Unix installations. :(
Novell si fine ans stable in small file/print servers but in actual 24/7 use it sucks big time and as much as I hate NT, I would recommend NT for increased stability over netware sany day.
Go put novell 4.11 in a machine with 4 gigs of ram and 2 cpu's with a 50 gigs of raid hardware and then log up to a 1,000 users and watch what happens. Crash!
I quite my last job because of constant calls in the night about my servers going down during heavy use and my NT boxes have only crashes once in 2 years!
My unix boxes never crashed ever and Novell has alot of ring 0 modules that run on it that can wipe out a 5th of my bussiness if these thigs conflict with another module or the os itself which does have fully procted memory.
You read that righ! Netware 4 has no protected memory and even though netware 5 supports ring 3 modules, most of them are still ring 0 and can take down your system at anytime. I experience a crash every 3 to 4 weeks with netware and its always the huge production machines that always go down. THe NT bozes are mostly idol so they never go down. The same can be said of netware itself.
The sucky crashy NT5 MMC thing actually supports remote administration the same way the NT4 tools do -- Change the "Domain" to the name of the computer you want to connect to. (Another failure in MS GUI design...)
Everyone is turning against MS these days
Whatever happened to them?
I ran NT4 sp5 at work for 6 months, but sick of the rebooted, and installed Win2k beta with the grace of the sysadmins (I manage my own box). The system has stayed up for months now, and is slightly faster (although not as fast as the home box).
listen good, i will only say this once. Microsoft has taken the strange steps of making their own DNS propriarity standard. Thats why other dns servers will have problems. If Novell includes DoS attacks in their TCP/IP stack i sure wouldnt call it Microsofts problem. Im BOTH an MCSE and CNE. Novell is a company of tech nerds, they tend to tell the truth. Microsoft is mainly buisiness people. Draw your own conclusions...
Sniff sniff
Oh - it's just the crock of SHIT that that AC immediately preceding me just left behind.
There is NO way you used any builds to any depth. I've used RC2 and the RTM, and it blows away NT4 for stability - and only games that have OS-detecting installs don't work.
Hey! Be nice! We're all shriveled geeks here, anyway...
Sounds like some training is in order.
hummmm, So the Novell Support Forums are what? er heh! I know! they're Forums. Wow that must have been a difficult leap for you to take! Need any more support goto Novell Forums they even help out Linux newB's in fact some of them even help write the Linux manuals! turn the brightness up!
I wouldn't bet on it. I doubt he could find another company where they let the janitors use the computers.
Novell and Microsoft were never partners. Even back in the old days when Novell had 80% market share, Microsoft was trying to sell it's OS/2 LANManager product.
Novell deserves to be where it is. They didn't even have TCP/IP support until *last year*!
Furthermore, they dumped their original plan of replacing NetWare with UnixWare, because they thought that nobody would ever run network applications on PC Hardware, and file+print would be the only market they ever had to be in. That decision was fatal -- Novell was stuck with the most primative NOS, and Microsoft just kicked their ass, and now Linux is mopping up what's left. (Just recently they've slowly trying to kludge NetWare up to look modern, but toooo little, toooo late.)
Indeed. That's my laptop (Actius A100 p233-64meg) --- trimmed out some bullshit services, and the kernal+desktop+services run in under 32meg. Boots and runs fast; nt3.51 and 4 were nightmares.
Novell recently shipped NetWare version 3.2 -- an update for a 8 year old product.
I don't see Microsoft shipping NT 3.2 or 4.1 or any other such business.
To clarify, by default Novell keeps DOS in the conventional 640K memory space. REMOVE DOS gives you 640K more memory for your Novell server. Unlike Windows 9x, DOS isn't doing anything when NetWare 3+ is running, just taking up memory.
Novell 2.x allowed you to task switch between the NetWare prompt and the DOS prompt. The idea was that someone could use the file server as a DOS workstation. This feature was taken out with version 3.
obviously someone is having a bad life. try taking some training and some prozak!
Novell also used to require specially 'blessed' disk controllers and network cards (meaning the manufactures had to send them a kickback).
Here is Novell's response to similar benchmarketing preformed by MScraft
For the second time, Mindcraft, Inc. has published a product comparison of dubious origin, unprofessional methods and biased results. Novell is embarrassed to respond to such prejudiced work, but does have an obligation to inform the market of the facts and publish its own benchmarks with accurate and reproducible results.
DUBIOUS ORIGIN Novell has contacted Mindcraft in an effort to determine the sponsor of this "research," but Mindcraft officials declined to disclose that information. Novell did not sponsor this project.
UNPROFESSIONAL METHODS
(1) Standard benchmarking practices were violated. For a NetBench benchmark to be considered publishable in a Ziff-Davis publication, there are two requirements that are absent in the Mindcraft results: (1) standard test configurations must be used, and (2) three test runs must be averaged to get the results. The standard NetBench test suite was not used, and no effort was made to demonstrate that Mindcraft's alternate settings produced equivalent results. Regarding the averaging of three separate test runs, Mindcraft replied that they ran series of tests tuning the systems until they were satisfied with them. After they were done tuning, they took the results of the final test.
(2) The benchmark test parameters used were known to give faulty results. Several days prior to final testing, Novell contacted a Mindcraft representative and informed him that the parameters that had been used on the previous testing were known to give false results. In fact, Microsoft themselves reported the error to Ziff-Davis thus validating the unpredictable nature of this parameter setting. Novell told Mindcraft on three separate occasions prior to publishing their report that using "Iteration-Based Timing" did not produce valid results. Many of the issues are addressed specifically in pages 154 and 155 of the NetBench documentation. While Mindcraft quoted frequently from the NetBench documentation in their white paper, they chose to ignore the documentation when it was in NT's best interests. Ziff-Davis does not support the use of Iteration-Based Timing, and in Novell's Performance Lab, Iteration-Based Timing inflated NT's performance. Mindcraft's use of this parameter implies either a lack of professional testing procedures or a deliberate attempt to influence the results.
(3) The server hardware configuration was contrived to put NT in it's best light. The NetFlex 3 PCI Network Interface Card allows a custom performance parameter. A Mindcraft representative informed us that it was essential to modify the parameter, otherwise NT "ran rather slowly." He also mentioned that with it set, they "saw a lot of blue screens," (server crashes). Additionally, the way the disks were attached to the RAID controller seemed suspicious. Rather than configure the disks for minimal cabling AND maximize total I/O bandwidth, the disks were configured to minimize I/O bandwidth to the test data volume, and maximize I/O bandwidth to the system volume, which is accessed by NT during testing. NetWare does not access the system volume during the NetBench test and is not affected by the performance of the system volume. This configuration was an obvious bias for NT Server and against NetWare. This configuration, while possible in a test environment, does not represent a typical business use.
(4) Major operational characteristics were applied unevenly. One key difference between the NetWare and NT Server testing is the use of opportunistic locking (client side caching). Mindcraft tested with opportunistic locking enabled for NT. However, Mindcraft did not enable opportunistic locking for NetWare.
Opportunistic locking allows a client to lock a file on the server in order to cache the file on the desktop. Additionally, Mindcraft reused the same files thus maximizing the positive impact of client- side caching. Microsoft ships NT Server with opportunistic locking on because of their desktop- dominant perspective of networking and need for any performance enhancements available. When opportunistic locking is enabled other end-users on the network will not have access to that file and associated data. Based on Novell's network-centric perspective, NetWare 5 is shipped with opportunistic locking disabled by default.
In a typical business use, enabling opportunistic locking can have a major impact on end-user productivity by making files and thus data unavailable. Even Microsoft recommends that customers disable opportunistic locking when running shared or networked applications such as Microsoft Access.
Included below are Novell's NetBench results equally comparing NT Server 4.0 and NetWare 5 with and without opportunistic locking. The results are significantly different that Mindcraft's.
OBVIOUSLY BIASED RESULTS
(1) The benchmark results are contrary to other published results. Mindcraft reports to have used the Ziff-Davis NetBench test. Results published by Ziff-Davis show that NetWare outperforms NT by approximately 47%. Testing by InfoWorld and Windows NT Magazine also shows that NetWare outperforms NT. Novell's test results show that NetWare outperforms NT. Both the test performed at Ziff-Davis labs and that at Novell used the standard NetBench test parameters and followed the accepted NetBench test practices.
(2) The Price/Performance metric cited is extremely misleading.
Mindcraft used pricing for Microsoft that requires a customer to sign a contract while it used standard retail product pricing for Novell. Mindcraft's used biased performance results. Mindcraft did not take into account that on average NetWare servers out-scales NT Servers on a nine-to-one basis. This would impact not only the hardware costs, but the management and administrative costs significantly, dramatically altering the cost/performance results. Mindcraft did not account for the fact that the purchase price of a server operating system is approximately 3-5% of the overall cost of running a network. The Gartner Group estimates that 78% of the cost of running a network are the management and administrative costs. When looking at the total cost of ownership (initial price, hardware requirements, number of reboots, management and administration, etc...) NetWare is clearly the price-performance leader.
SUMMARY
We welcome the opportunity to work with Mindcraft to resolve these glaring issues and produce a quality analysis. We would also encourage Mindcraft to disclose the sponsor of this project and retract the report based on the obvious inaccuracies. Novell is confident in the performance and overall capabilities of NetWare 5, and will work with any and all parties that are interested in producing honest and impartial product comparison.
find this at http://www.novell.com/advantage/nw5/nw5-mindcraftc heck.html
We tried some DOS attacks? Is it just me, or does that sound weak?
Ya mean like Apple SCSI hard drives *still* do?
Are you a moron?
I'll take this point by point:
I have no idea (please give me one) of what linux uses for a central user accounts
Have you ever considered reading documentation? There's loads of it over at http://www.linuxdoc.org/. And that's just a beginning.
Can "unix" clients logon to AD servers?
Not knowing what AD stands for (I admin UNIX and Novell servers, NT only as clients), I'd guess Samba might be able to, which would allow pretty much any UNIX to. However, like I said above, why don't you go read some docs and find out for yourself?
But i hate the novell client because it has a very retro feel.
Betcha hate bellbottoms, too. They're coming back, you know.
All the admin utilities do not have an easy gui and do not perform very well.
Dear Lord, save us from the CLI! We all know that pretty clicky buttons and checkboxes more than make up for actually learning your way around a system, don't we? Pretty pictures on our screens will save everyone from actually learning how to use computers, right? Oh, yes, did you completely miss out on NWADMIN.EXE?
You cannot get things done fast.
Maybe that's because you don't know what the hell you're doing.
Theres more but i'll just piss myself off.
You're sure pissing me off.
For instance, if they don't feel that NT is secure enough (compared to their macs) then they should use linux.
Right, with NFS? Now that's some REAL security! No, NCP beats the hell out of NFS. Unfortunately, there's not a really good way to integrate it with Linux.
I've also seen computers (including my precious laptop) fucked up when i tried to remove the Novell Client.
I'll grant you that. However, this is partially a fault of Windows in general- programs can't keep to their own directory; they have to go all over the system, and jack up libraries and the registry... but I'm sure you know how that is.
I will never do it again.
Good for you. Now do you have any real complaints about Novell?
But, this is ridiculous. MicroSux. We just proved they are a monopoly(and maybe who knows what will go along with that!). They have been ripping everyone off for years. Why are we even giving them the FTOD on the site?
When I read that I wasn't sure what shocked me the most... that fact that they fired the entire staff...or the fact that they actually had 60 people for marketing... sheesh
I don't know jack about marketing departments, but last year the institution I work at (unnamed for obvious reasons) fired the entire IT staff. That was roughly 40+ people....
Basically, the PC network was unusable (It still requires roughly 15 minutes to login to any PC on campus.. Thank god I use and take care of my own Mac..), and the process of "upgrading" all the Unix machines to AFS was not received well... Many researchers lost over 4 months, while the Unix machines (mostly Solaris, but a few AIX boxes) were moved to AFS...
The best part of this whole situation, was that the administration was just trying to send a message... Well it certainly did that. Half the staff (the better half) left and those who were rehired have very little loyalty to the faculty/staff/administration as you'd expect. Well, maybe it wasn't funny, but I got a kick out it.. Administrators are morons!!!
A rule in advertising says that you should always
present the benefits of your product and not
bash the competition. Your customer should think
about you and not about the other guy.
It is IMHO a bad sign for Novell's state of health,
that they are falling back into such tactics.
Time to sell NOVL and buy something with a
future (like XYBR?)
You need just to learn one word: NDS. By the sound of your message though I get the idea that you are one of those WinKiddies using beta versions of Win2K and clicking yourself a psi arm instead of reading a manual.
I work at a school and while I don't have any novell experience, WinNT4 and Win2k are the dual banes of my existance. There isn't a single day we go through that something doesn't go wrong, and configuring a new server takes forever, with a new BDC often crashing the entire network (stopping logins, that is). Our Mac servers performs flawlessly. In 3 years I've never needed to touch them. Not once.
oh bullshit! I have a similar configuartion, a 233K6 with 64MB RAM. Win2k flies in this configuration - faster than Windows 98, infact. You have obviously NEVER even used Win2k. Just more FUD spread by twats waving the opensource banner.
.... there was STDA - StreetTalk Directory Assistance... created as part of Banyan VINES... It's sad that such a fine *nix-based NOS faded into obscurity.... Ask me about it sometime... - If you take useable out of unstable, what are you left with?
Hah, the usefulness of Macintosh Software today is about the same as DOS software though. Who cares about your stupid chip and OS when you can't do shit with them. Windows 2000 trashes netware, its solid, it has programs, its easy to configure.
There seems to be some angst about this release of Win2000. If we get past the hype and to the basic facts... NetWare with NDS has been out for some years. It's pretty good, and make the management of networks very easy (including centrally managed printers). It looks like Novell is building on a very solid base, while Microsoft look to throw the baby out with the bath-water every time there's a new version of Windows. In the end, marketing will win out - not the best technology. BTW, even though I love Linux, and would use it simply because it's cool, I would much rather put in a NetWare server to manage network resources.
No, I'm not exaggerating...
Then your just outright bad a configuration or installation.
Win2K is faster than 98 on every machien we have it on, and MORE stable than our Linux boxes ont he same hardware.
Even the 32 meg laptops like it.
&sign($AC[0]);
If you can't make NT4 run reasonably well you will not have any better luck with win2k.
Nope -- Novell wasn't usable without the blessed/kickback drivers.
Apples work fine with 3rd party SCSI + IDE drives. However, for some reason their formatting tool won't format drives without Apple's OEM string. It's a strange decision because Apple hasn't sold aftermarket drives for a long time.
(There is nothing that strange about the Apple SCSI OEM string. I have two IBM SCSI drives, one marked PCCO (for IBM PC Company), the other without marking. I also have a Seagate drive that I bought at retail but is marked for SUN.)
NetWare2.x was outdated by 1988.
Linus didn't even get Linux out 'till 1991.
Shall we talk about Samba's timeline, too? When was it started?
I'm seeing a lot of years 'tween NetWare 3.x being released and Linux's file serving (in a DOS/Windows environment).
Either they've upgraded a 2.x box that they've had running for, what, 12 YEARS now or they don't know what they're talking about.
Come on. 12 YEARS with a single OS is a DAMN good investment. They certainly got their money's worth out of it.
That's typical for Netware. They don't need maintenance until dust clogs the CPU fan and the box overheats. Then you suddenly realize how much you've forgotten!
Perhaps some day Novell will get a clue and make their products less reliable. Then things will turn around for them. But until then, it's a damn fine system.
Everyone at my company does, and there's a darn good reason. When you install one too many programs on Win95/Win98/NT and start to have weird registry trouble that keeps the system from working, you need to be able to get your files off the box before you wipe and reinstall. (Reinstalling w/out wiping tends not to fix things.)
And how do we do that? With good ol' reliable MS-DOS 6.22 boot floppy, of course. So you have to use a filesystem that MS-DOS 6.22 can read.
Windows 2000 Pro will not run on anything less then 64MB. I think that you miss understood the MS benchcraft :)
I'm a Linux fan but I must say that the lack of reliable, proven *open-source* directory services is very bad news for Linux. It can seriously slow down the process of integrating Linux into the enterprise.
Facts:
1: Very soon most enterprise Linux boxes will be forced to coexist with W2K/AD without any help from M$, of course. Most Linux servers will have to become W2K DNS clients somehow and so on.
And M$ will publish comparisons like this:
Directory services
W2K: free, included, integrated, AD-aware BackOffice
Linux: expensive add-on only, not all hw platforms
supported, limited number of supporting apps
2: Most companies that run BackOffice or other firmly NT-based enterprise-wide apps have no other choice than to upgrade to W2K eventually (surely not now, maybe around 2001/2002). The company I work for (European company, approx. 5000 desktop users) uses Exchange for e-mail on more than 15 servers and recently bought 3000+ client access licences. The next version of Exchange (of course) *requires* Active Directory. Our management is very anti-M$ after the troubles we had but the only other option is to switch to another mail server software which is totally out of question. M$ is smart enough to sharply reduce Exchange 4/5 support as soon as possible. The management finally has to decide which way to go: upgrade or redesign the entire mail system. You know the answer.
3: AD is going to be slow, buggy, unreliable when released. But after some time usability will certainly improve and become acceptable for all but the largest organizations.
4: The claims in the articles that a significant number of software developers are holding back their W2K/AD projects are quite misleading and
these decisions may rapidly change if AD is not a complete disaster but a moderate success instead.
Please tell me:
WHAT IS THE OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY'S DIRECTORY SERVICES STRATEGY?
Use NDS? Don't use it at all? Wait for a better free-source alternative? Or what?
Clarify:
Did the admin fire the IT staff 'cause the network sucked and AFS was installed, or did the problems arise as a result of firing the IT people?
The fact of the matter is Novell lost the battle themselves, Microsoft was just there to eat their lunch. High prices, expensive support and a product that required training to use properly.
Bwahahahahaha. You're most likely lying about your size, exaggerating greatly, and you're still relatively small. Lesson of the day: there's always a bigger fish.
Dialing 511 on your phone.
...trying to foist off forgeries, oh forgive me, simulations, as factual evidence in a anti-trust trial.
...having execs for all intents and purposes purjor themselves on the stand in the DOJ anti-trust trial (making a statement on the stand to the contrary of the evidence proving otherwise...)
...having been caught with their pants down, trying to arrange a "grass-roots" movement supporting them with faked letters, etc.
Deal with this fact- Microsoft has no credibility at this point. They burned it all up with their wrangling trying to get out of the DOJ action. Nobody except someone who bought into their PR or someone who's got a vested interest in MS products would believe a single damn thing they say nowadays.
There is no equal in the unix world. thats one of many unix problems.
the best directory of Unix is NDS (Sun, SCO, Linux)
nope not accurate. Netware 2 did NOT require a dongle...sorry.
It did require being "compiled" though. Basically Novell sent you the tools, and you build your own OS. Pretty cool. I think that is about where Linux is now...hehe.
Except for the high purchase price part. And you can't even get support unless you're running a certain distro, which you must not tinker with or otherwise cause to deviate from the default configuration.
you fucking suck shit
fuck you you fucking shitbag. fuck you.
Why wasn't this moderated up to "informative?"
This is the orginally poster who had alot of problems with netware. I didn't look at my spelling and I am a very dyslexic typer so forgive the errors.
Anyway, the servers that constantly crash here at work use a product called legetto. The system administrators have told me that they had nothing but problems from them.
Even if legotto is crap it shouldn't crash your system. I am spoiled from freebsd and linux and I totally expect all OS's to have protected memory.
I am wondering if this the product that brought your servers? Also the servers don't act up here at work unless over 750 users log in.
I recall what a bitch it was when we upgraded the fileservers a ways back. Lost the damn Novell dongle. Getting a replacement required shitloads of documentation, blood, urine, and DNS samples? Thank gawd we run Linux now.
I have customers still using NW3.12. Guess it helps if you know what you're doing...
no it's not FUD, it is the damn truth. I've used Win2k, and it blows dead bears. Sure, a little more stable than NT4, but this borg-like take over your DNS crap stinks...
"NT doesn't have a command.com, it has a cmd.exe"
That's not true, NT has both command.com and cmd.exe.
cmd.exe being a 32bit command interpreter and command.com being 16bit and running under the NTVDM.
I challenge you muyThaiBxr - prove you can crash W2K. I have heard this type of claim over and over and I do not believe it. We tried to crash our W2K boxes with DoS attacks and everything we could think of - it didn't even burp. Care to put some proofs to that wild claim? I mean, I can root any linux box in 30 seconds using my TRS-80 pocket computer... if just writing it was proof enough of the deed... I'll provide the W2K box and you take it down - oK?
"Did you know that Windows 2000 hasn't been released yet? Even though Microsoft has announced that it is finished working on it and has distributed it to certain major players, it is not publically available yet."
That's funny because HP is now selling computers with Windows 2000.
HP computers with Windows 2000
Well, what we have here is another case of pure BS that will probably be moderated upwards cause it bashes MS. I'm using Com4 for my modem right now to send/receive faxes under W2K (using the built in faxing software). No problems. Rc1 is ancient and RTM is worlds differnt. I've been to firingsquad - did you not notice that it was on a 1) beta release version still, using 2) beta, untuned unofficial leaked drivers that do not have AGP support active? I found it interesting that the beta nvidia drivers running under W2K WITHOUT AGP support were about the same as fully matured NT4 drivers with AGP support. Guess what'll happen when nvidia releases the tuned, AGP enabled drivers... but, of course, this will be moderated down, and the other up so everyone will begin to chant: W2K can't use Com4! sigh...
On the desktop:
Windows95 = Macintosh89
In the Datacenter:
Windows2000 = Netware1994
plain and simple. you are an idiot. You don't like the Novell Client because of a "retro feel". Sorry, but even the admin tools for Netware 3 have a gui now.
So, you saw computer fucked up when you removed the Novell Client, but you have never had that problem with Microsoft, and in particular the MS Client for MS Networking....gimmie a break. I suspect that you have never actually worked in the IT industry. What a loser.
1. Define Solid.
2. What programs. Even Ziff-Davis, the original MS ass kissers admit that there is no software for Windows 2000.
3. Netware is very easy, in the hands of a skilled admin. Now do you see why you have so much trouble with it. You are a moron...
They didn't even have TCP/IP support until *last year*!
What?
There has been TCP/IP support available in Netware since at least 3.12 when I first started with Netware. Granted, it would install and use IPX by default, but IP was available.
Admittedly, Unixware was a rather odd idea, but more than likely founded on the generally accepted idea the *NIX is rock-solid underneath. What better platform from which to build a file and print server?
And the comment about the most primative NOS, more than likely referring to the lack of a GUI until recently, is downright funny. My experience, and thousands of others around the world, has been that video drivers are one of the biggest sources of instability there is under NT. In general, what's the one thing you don't have to worry about in Netware? Exactly.
Servers are just that - servers. People may perform management functions while sitting at them, but that's about the extent of it. You don't sit down at them and run applications or games. The lack of a server based desktop GUI (or any GUI before NW 5) on Netware is more than made up for by the GUI tools used to manage it remotely. For me, the lack of a GUI seems like a healthy advantage. You can take the exact "lack of GUI" concept, and apply it to Linux or BSD. Just telnet to the box, and manage it from there. No muss, no fuss.
You are a jackass. Could someone please explain to me why only complete and total morons hate Novell and why skilled network admins love it. Really, I want to know.
Netware 3 most certainly did not die. And MS did NOT offer y2k fixes for all of their old software. Please get a clue before you post. Idiot.
Well you can order a 3 user license and a CD of Novell NetWare stamped NFR for free. I've got one I just cant stand Novell personally Id rather use NT.
I did not find a SINGLE item in the MS FUD that was truthful. MS said it and so you believe it. Your fundamental problem is that you are reading the FUD and taking them at their word (both Novell and Microsoft) and turning it into a he said she said debate.
Take the FUD and apply it to what you know of the technologies and the products. The only way to come to the conclusion that the MS URL is anything other than pure BS FUD shows a fundamental lack of understanding re: the technologies and the products. There simply was little to nothing factual in the MS document, whereas the Novell document dealt fairly and painly with the issues. If know the technologies, then you can interprit for yourself that this is true, otherwise you can continue to whine and rant as you are doing zico. Deal with that.
I run it on my 32mb laptop fine.
Most people say this because Netware uses DOS as a loader. They just don't realize how SLICK that is. Pretty cool. Because of that they tend to think of Netware the same way they think of Win3.1, a shell on top of an OS. If they took ten minutes to learn something they would know that you can type REMOVE DOS at the console and command.com is history, gone, adios.
Oh well. Ignorance is bliss
And if you are using apps that actually require it, like Groupwise or an Oracle DB on Netware, it works amazingly well.
However, for file and print services Netware 5 and 5.1 still do not properly utilize more than one processor. What's funny, is that a single processor Netware box can still server files, print jobs, and web services faster than a multiprocessor NT box. Go figure. Thats probably why SMP is so important to you, you need a quad Xeon 600 for NT to keep up with my single processor PII 400 Netware box. Oh well. Life's harsh when you don't know what's really going on...
You could take off the rose coloured glasses and see that its not a problem. If Netware can do with one what requires another OS 2, good for Novell.
What is important is the performance, period and Netware's is superior.
You seem to be a bit too fixated with hardware, kinda like short man's disease. If I can do more transactions per second, I don't care how many processors. If I can do more transaction with less hardware, all the better.
It is really sad that what you are pointing out is a Netware strength but you just refuse to see it..
I swear, everything you'll ever need to know about *nix can be found in one of the OReilly animab books.
I've been forced to use daily builds for over a year, up to and including the RTM version. Win 2000 is NOT any more stable than previous versions, its performance is NOT great, it's multimedia is inferior to other operating systems and Active Directory is utter crap compared to NDS.
That's the voice of experience. Every OS has it's place, and for file and print nothing compares to Netware.
Some people are trying to say that file and print are commodity services, unfortunately that's just true. Not when Netware is THAT much better than everyone else...
it uses DOS all the way??? You can't be serious. That is just plain ignorance, and considering your smart ass tag line its pretty amazing you would post something that is so 100% completely false. Netware has absolutely no dependincies upon DOS except for initial loading. Period. And DOS can easily be removed from the server by typing REMOVE DOS at the console.
Very good points, well written. I think that you should understand that if you were the novell side of the "political campaign" speeches, you would be getting a lot of votes because you are very persuasive, and also very correct.
Damn, must suck to be a M$ lover... glad I don't know the feeling...
I'll try to stick to your third paragraph...
1. Personally I don't agree with the idea that File and Print are commodity services. Not when there is another platform that is THAT much better at it. If you follow the thinking that file and print are commodity, then NT would seem to make a great solution
2. Follow me on this. People are finally starting to seperate the network from the servers. Which is a plus. Now you have network specialists (Cisco, 3COM, Lucent, Nortel) and Server specialists (Netware, NT, Linux, OS/2, SCO). Yes I were both hats, but not on the same job. That seperation is good for companies. Now throw in a third specialist. Directory. You can have people how manage the Cisco routers and 3COM switches, you can have people who tune NT and Linux and Netware servers, but the directory runs the show. Now introducing a third, or a fourth platform simply isn't as big a deal as it was before. Networks are complex, and people are finally realizing the NT everywhere (or Linux everywhere) cry simply does not work. Performance counts for something.
Just my thought, learn to love the directory. x.500 is cool....
Until Netware 5, TCP/IP only worked for file+print if you ran it through a IPX gateway product Novell sold. Surely you know this -- don't BS the issue.
Netware is the most primitive NOS because it runs everything (interesting) non-SMP in Ring 0, with *no* memory protection. (I bet you know this too.) Sure it runs fast, and nowadays it runs stable, but that fundamental lack of flexibility has doomed Novell to the legacy-sucking market share they have now.
Did they have alternatives? Did they know about them? Could they make a real application server? Hell yes! They owned the f*-ing UNIX franchise! Instead they pissed it away and decided to focus the file sharing market.
The reason Microsoft is kicking Novell's ass is because they sell a 'total package', not a highly optimized "primitive" piece of software that only does one or two things. Don't forget that the real costs are in the support personnel, not the hardware or licenses (although, Novell could lower their prices). What ever Microsoft didn't take, Linux will get -- becuase they offer the same deal, only cheaper.
(PS: It's nice that you projected your lack-of-GUI anxieties on me. I thought NetWare 5 HAS a GUI.)
I'm not too fond of Groupwise or Exchange. If you want Groupware, run Notes. If you just want messaging, SMTP and POP3 or IMAP. Sendmail on a Linux server will rock this. Novell Internet Messaging System on Netware isn't too bad either, but it is EXTREMELY new, and trying to get into a crowded market.
However, Bordermanager rules. There is no other product on any platform that rocks like Bordermanager rocks. The best proxy and the best firewall in the business in a single piece of software. But.....like everything else it requires a skilled professional to install and maintain properly. Too bad there aren't many of these out there, and I mean in very general IT terms. There just aren't more than 1 or 2 thousand IT pros who actually deserve their paychecks.
My experience with apps on Novell has been very positive. And we are talking nine years of experience now. Apps written for Netware work well, there just are not enough of them (same problems for BSD, SCO, OS/2, Linux). There just are not enough Java programmers and NLM masters out there to compensate for the fact that my trashman writes WIN32 apps in his spare time..EVERYONE writes win32 apps. Most of them suck, but they are everywhere. God bless Visual Basic.
Oh well.
You are absolutely correct on so many statements it was quite refreshing. Not something you see enough of here on /.
Other fun notes, as we discuss adhereance to open standards. I think its pretty funny that IPv6 has just as much in common with IPX as it does IPv4. IPX is as good as IPv4 for so many reasons. The number one complaint against IPX is that it is chatty, and that is actually a mistruth. Netware servers broadcast resources, but so do NT servers. And NT servers will do it over IP also. Setting up IPX network numbers has always been so easy. The server's internal, make it the serial number of your base license. The external, make it the same as your IP network number. If your ip network number is 10.5.128.0, then your IPX is 1051280. And the awesome part. Screw individual IP management and DHCP. IPX takes care of node numbering on its own. Where did they get the idea to implement that in IPv6. Mmmmmmm! I wonder. If IPX had been thrown open, we would all be doing IPX networks now, no IP. IPX is just TOOOO much easier for the LAN, and not too bad for the WAN, with NLSP at least. IPX RIP on the WAN does less damage than IP RIP on the WAN.
Open standards are fine, but ultimately I want to get the job done and go home. There are more imporant things in my life than playing with computers and networks at work, and using Netware allows me to do those other things.
It's funny. The people that actually know Netware love it. The people that bash it, don't know what it is, how it works, what it can and can't do. I think it may have hurt Novell when they carried the Netware brand name all the way through to 5.1 2.x and 3.x are totally different products. The move from 3.x (bindery) to 4.x (NDS) was pretty sharp also. The move from 4.x (IPX) to 5.x (IP) wasn't too bad. It was a change in protocol preference. I think a re-branding on the move from bindery to NDS would have been a good thing though. Too many people have memories of Netware 3.11 and they think Netware 5.1 is the same thing. Not that 3.11 was bad, but some people just didn't like it. They preferred File Shares through WfW 3.11, go figure.
One of the real issues, is that Netware self tunes itself better than any other OS for file and print services. Of course you can do it better as an admin, when you get you hands dirty in the startup and autoexec ncf files, but you need to monitor your servers, see what they are doing and know what you REALLY want out of your SET commands before you start commiting changes. Most other operating systems you have to do all the tuning by hand, and with NT you are very limited with the tuning that you can actually do.
Yea, NT can find all my processors, but it just can't use them effectively until I put in a registry hack. Who ever imagined processors with L2 cache greater than 256k. Go figure....
It's fun to watch people pay extra for 2MB Xeons, 'cause a celeron just can't run a business, and then they don't use the cache. Funny....
And Novell's helpful answer was "upgrade". Why can't they fucking fix their own broken crap? Until 1/1/00 it worked just fine. The new features and bloat of newer versions are not wanted. At least MS offered Y2K bug fixes for stuff as old as Windows 3.1 (DOS had no problems).
I have seen Netware 4.11 boxes with a single pentium processor, 1GB and 100+GB of storage serving over 2000 users. With uptime over 300 days. Sounds to me like the admin at your last site could use some training....
If they don't know Netware what makes you think they can do NT.
Oh that's right, any jackass can setup an NT box and achieve the most basic functionality. So long as no more than 2 or three people are accessing the NT server at one time, sure. You should do fine then...
dork....go back to high school, learn something about world history, and then come pretend to be an IT pro after you done with puberty
It's backup software. It is also fairly popular. The only problems that I have ever had with Netware servers all revolve around ArcServe. Anyone who has worked with Netware as long as I have can tell you similar horror stories, but ArcServe just wasn't a nice product back in the Netware 3.x days.
Excuse me? BIND is a well documented product that
might as well be called a standard. It follows
all the conventions that I have read.
If MS's product crashes it, it is truly ms's fault! If a patch, or alteration is foisted on a
working product, and then the product no longer works - it IS the alterer's problem.
If ms is once again making inconsistencies in the standard products to make their life easier, then they should be pummeled with rotten veggies..
AC by convention (and laziness)
It's backup software. It is also fairly popular. The only problems that I have ever had with Netware servers all revolve around ArcServe. Anyone who has worked with Netware as long as I have can tell you similar horror stories, but ArcServe just wasn't a nice product back in the Netware 3.x days.
I found the best way to backup Netware, and any PC Server for that matter is with ADSM running on an RS/6000. THATS THE SHIT!!!!! Hand over the backup tape monkey garbage to an IBM operator. Awesome baby!!
I like the analogy, mainly cause its true. Novell had to do something, and they handled the situation very well.
1. When did NT start using TCP/IP. Because if you actually know what you are talking about, then you know that NT using NetBeui to faciliate IP the same why Netware uses IPX to facilitate it. Don't let the truth get in your way man. The only way around is to use a third party IP. NT just hides it better, and Novell is very frank about how Netware does it. Go figure...
2. I'm sure you know that you have been able to run applications protected since 1991 on a Netware server. It is actually pretty simple. Keep in mind, apps on NT DO NOT run in seperate memory space by default either. But I'm sure you know that. The difference, NT just hides the truth from you, but you can find it. Novell is straight forward about how to do it. Go figure....
3. Yea, the did piss away Unix. Too many people since think ATT owns unix. Now lets see what SCO can do with it, since it worked out so well for everyone else, I have to believe that SCO could own the world any day now. Go figure...
4. Yes the complete package. Too bad each individual NT server can only do one thing. So long as my NT box is only a file server, its solid. If it only doing SQL, it's fairly solid. If it is doing chewing gum and walking at the same time, it implodes on itself..so, yes NT can do 1000 things, you just need 1000 servers to accomplish this. I assume this is why channel resellers and Intel love Microsoft. Go figure....
5. Netware 5 does have a GUI. At the console type STARTX and you are rocking. The nice thing, you can shutdown the GUI and do away with that overhead, thus increasing performacne for applications and services. How do you do that on NT? Go figure....
Sorry dude, you are full of FUD.
Things that Netware has done since 1990. Even before NDS... Yippie for AD.
Wow, so you hoping to hold of installs until early March. Cool. From other traffic here at /. it looks like SP1 is due out Feb 18 at noon, so holding off for sp2 might not be long enough. Try sp6....
Think about it. Novell has NEVER been a company that demands that you use their products for everything. The nature of NDS allows for other operating systems to co-habitate peacfully. So who is to say that they will go after Linux/BSD.
There is simply no reason to believe that it would happen. None.
Okay, if a large company like Novell, with an outstanding group of products like Netware and NDS can't compete with Microsoft, then I'm sure Red Hat will be here in two years.
Netware is more widely installed than Unix. Period. Add em up, SCO, SUN, IBM, HP, DG, etc. Novell beats em in market share. It aint over.
Do yourself and your career a favor. Get a new job. Now.
Yea, and when you install NT you get 10 MCSE's straight of one week boot camp to run your "enterprise". Much better.
At least one CNE can handle 10 Netware servers. It's not like when you install Netware you have to hire a CNE. But the only way to make any distincion amoung the 10 million NT "experts" (self-proclaimed) is that about 200,000 of them are MCSE's. MCSE's know less than CNE's. Oh well.....
Oh, you must be bringing jesus to me... well, can he do dishes? If he does He's hired... How does $5 per hour sound?
FUD Stinks. Period. But no FUD stinks more than the Linux everywhere FUD. Go figure...
Cool I am certified by MS, Novell, Citrix, IBM, the AMA, and Cisco. Does this mean my opinion counts more???
NDS is better.
It exists.
For ten years now.
It is a directory for managing EVERYTHING in your network. Cisco routers, NT servers, Netware Servers, Users, Printers, 3COM Switches, Nortel PBX, Linux Servers, SCO Servers, Sun Servers, and the list goes on and on
AD is not as good.
It still does not exist.
Even after five years of promises.
It's a cheap remodeling of the NT Domain structure. It might manage your NT 5 servers, but don't put an older version of NT in there, it screws everything up. And absolutely under no circumstances should you put an alternative OS in there. That's just evil.
By the way, each MCSE test passed does not give you an additional MCP certification. Just want to clarify that for you. If that were the case I would be somewere around 30 certs....
And it STILL does not require DOS for anything other than initial load
With Netware 3 you could use OS/2 to load Netware and then still use your server as a client. And all the OTHER clients accessed just like they did any other Netware server. Weird, but it worked very well.
Well, those are both just too legacy for me. I have to read the cover of PCWeek so I know what is new and cool and what I should be using next week.
hehe - go figure
NOVELL ROCKS!
I got my WARP! baby!!!!
l egos/portman/suckl!!!!!
ps. windows/linux/freebso/turtles/cmdrdraco/slashdot/
Fuck... I don't care. I worship Linus :-)
Lets just say just because a system ships with XXX doesn't mean it stays with XXX. I know of companies that wiped Win/95 off of new machines to install win3.1. Or other companies that did the same thing with Win/98 to install win/95. It's alot easier to standardize the new machines then to upgrade all the machines currently in the company. Many of these companies would be choosing no OS if they could save the money. They already own licenses for the machines they are upgrading.
Red Hat has over 60 people in marketing/sales. The point I'm trying to make isn't that RH is bad, but that a marketing force of 60 people isn't all that amazing.
wh47 d0 y0u h4v3 4g41n57 7urn1ng n474113 p0r7m4n 1n70 4 nud3 m4rb13 5747u3??? 1 7h1nk 17'5 1337!!!!
d0n'7 d155 p37r1f13d n474113 p0r7m4n 0r y0u m1gh7 b3 p37r1f13d n3x7!!!!
Like all bible thumping idiots......this is an excellent example of circular logic. Sugggestion.....take your prozac numbnuts.
You can't sign a contract with M$ and expect them to honor it.
Quick ! run to the server room and free the servers!! take 'em home! ship them to ppl!! free them!! ;P what company is this?
Or, in Souff Park-speak: [A commercial is messing] Lad: Woss the chuffin' future of America, isit?Is it the brass we make, isit? [A dollar flies by the James
Dean] Lad: The chuffin' quests we conquer [Shot of Neil Armstrong on the moon flies by] Lad: No. It's the bleedin' children. [Shows a pic of the bloomin' five
fellas] Lad: So wot do the children 'ave ter say about Microsoft, isit? [Kyle's loaf of bread flies by] Kyle: I don't like big corporations. [Then Stan] Stan: I
like wee businesses. [Then Cartman] Cartman: I believe in the family owned enterprise. [Kenny] Kenny: To cop back ter the bleedin' home owned enterprise.
[And finally Tweek] Tweek: Ah! Struth! Lad: It's time ter put the mockers on large corporations. Prop Ten is about children. Vote yes on Prop Ten or else yer
'ate children. Yer don't 'ate children, do yer, isit?Remember, right, keep a septic tank business wee or else. [Show a pic of all five fellas' 'eads as burnt skulls
wiv 'ats] Lad: Paid for by Novell and citizens for a fair and equal way ter get Microsoft kicked out of tahn forever.
FUD implies some will to live, some scrap of spirit still left in an otherwise hollow shell, some lingering belief in a product and company. And it is obvious to everyone that Novell has none of these things. Therefore it can't be FUD--it must be something else.
What is it, I hear you ask in a hushed voice. It is similar to the sounds that a kitten would make if you buried it to its head and gave it a good once over with a lawnmower named NT4-Marketing. Imagine the muffled squeel quickly cut off and the sound of blood and kitten-nuggets splattering on the inside of the rusted lawnmower frame. That is exactly what this web page is. A FUD campaign it is not. If you thought NT4-Marketing was bad, W2k-Marketing is the riding lawnmower of doom to Novell with an insane, $5-an-hour-paid, potmarked teenager named Steve Balmer. You know the one; the kid who gets high from slaughtering defenseless kittens.
wtf? why the hell should you need more then 64 megs of ram to run windows??
Ideally BIND shouldn't crash.
It should whine and bitch and moan, but it shouldn't crash...
this is how Microsoft treats all its partners. I laugh when I say companies like HP ben over backwards to curry their favor by joining all of Microsoft's work groups to thwart Sun's Java technology. It's sort of like watching the weak, unpopular kid trying his hardest to be friends with the The Big Man on Campus. The fun part comes when TBMOC pisses on the weak kid.
Will Slashdot or Novell be the first to break each piece of anti-Micros~1 news? The next time the Windows 2000 schedule slips, where will we read about it?
Heh, good one.
Free Slash !
The real reason that Micros~1 decided to call the next release by a four digit year number had nothing to do with Y2K worries:
Windows 00 = Win Nothing = Lose.
You ARE talking about Novell, right? NetWare? And, by "dongle", you mean the hardware plug that sits on the parallel port? Dude (or dudette), I haven't seen ANYTHING about those and I've been working with NetWare since 3.11 (about 12 years ago). That seems to have been about 3 YEARS before Linux was even STARTED. I think you've gotten Novell confused with a proprietary app that required the dongle on the server as a hardware server key. That's not a Novell thing.
Bringing this back onto topic, I think what he's trying to say is that we must worship either Novell or Microsoft. Or is he saying that neither Novell nor Microsoft exists? That Linux users are really atheists? Just what the hell is he trying to say? And what does it have to do with this topic?
My roommate installed Win2K after showing up to an M$ "employment information session" that they sponsored at our CS dept. He got a free Win2K disk, installed, and a week later, was running Win98 again. The Win2K disk is now a beer coaster, and we try not to use it. In the words of a friend, "I don't think even Microsoft could cause a beer to crash... but I'm not chancing it." There are a few things. - I have never seen W2K Pro crashing and I am running it since August'99. - Your roomie does not need an OS, all he needs is pro'lly a game machine. - Someone goes back to W98 after working on W2K for a while, it can be attributed to one of the following reasons... 1.(s)He is not an advanced user (in Windows). 2.(s)He is using a 468ish system with 64MB of RAM.
"serving satan" and worshiping him are two separate and distinct things. Infact, one could claim that you could worship 'god' and still be "serving satan". This fits you to a T actually. There are probably more atheists in the world due to assholes like you than anything else.
Did the ppl at ms ever even see a nw 5.1 box running nds 8 ?? 'novell dosn't support fault tolerence' ? uhhh lol
"Yes, my friend's NT workstation crashes 30 times per day
Nope. Takes too long to reboot. He gives up after the 10th crash.
devours babies
Get a life.
and sends your mother's credit card numbers to microsoft in it's spare time
It keeps trying but with the AOL 5.0 software on it, it hasn't succeeded yet.
Everyone here seems to be forgetting about Kerberos. Kerberos is a most excellent directory service built @ MIT for *nix, it's availalbe for Linux, too. Active Directory speaks Kerberos natively, so you can interop you Active Directory with Linux very easily. Check out a whitepaper on it at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/library/howit works/security/kerbint.asp
FUCK YOU!!! Fuck you whorebat!
Novell had fixes to netware 3, on their support site, ready to download, and my 3.12 server didnt die. Nuff said.
So you state your size and ask why people are so concerned? What a dork. Troll-feeder.
Ummmm Last time I checked, NW 3.12 is Y2K compliant with free patches, and Netware 3.2 is STILL a currently shipping product. Netware 3.11 or 3.10 hasn't been a shipping product for many years now.
1 d0n'7 533 why 3v3ry0n3 15 50 0pp053d 70 th3 h07 y0ung M5. p0r7m4n b31ng 7urn3d 70 570ne!!! wh47'5 up w17' d47??
This is all comletely hypothetical, because it assumes tat both of these (Christian) gods exists.
A true athiest (as opposed to one who rejects Jesus) believes that they do not exist at all, let alone not worship them.
Never mind, you guys are obviously American and have been brainwashed into not being capable of free thought.
Bad luck.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
You dared to defile the sacred name of SLASHDOT? Nothing but hot days in hell can befall you and your ilk. CmdrTaco is never wrong! Hemos is omniscient! RobLimo can see into the future! JonKatz runs windows without it crashing!
Linux advocates never lie, or would say anything that is less than true. For example, a linux user would never say
BILL GATES CLUBS BABY SEALS!
or even
MICROSOFT IS A COMMIE FRONT!
because Linux users are kind, wise people who never need to resort to FUD to support their beleiefs.
No go repent
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
I sincerely wish Novell luck in their FUD campaign agaisnt MS. It should be fun to watch these two fight it out because both OSes are fairly competitive.
you will get better results. karma me, bizatches
When you install Novell, you get to have CNEs hanging around your office. CNEs don't deserve to lick the dog shit off the bottom of my shoes. They must train CNEs how to dial phone numbers real fast because I've never seen a CNE that didn't spend 80% of the network installation time on the phone to tech support.
"If it doesn't work, call tech support (and wait on hold for a real long time while we help all the other CNE morons)."
Goddamn it! Take your jesus bullshit and shove it up your ass. Who gives a shit anyway ? Get the hell out of here. Go to your church or something and leave us sane people alone...
-- http://z80.org - all opinions, all the time --
i have to work with novell 4 and 5 servers every day and novell is Satan's Spawn. especially Groupwise.
Novell Netware just doesn't matter anymore. I can't imagine what they'll accomplish by trying to attack Win2K. They certainly aren't a viable alternative to it. Everywhere I've been the past few years has been using Unix + Samba for network file storage from PCs!
---------
---------
See who's a dork today! Check out dork.to
The server version requires 108 megs of ram just to run and it uses over 2,200 threads. Go to www.firingsquad.com and learn how a dual cpu system underperforms a single cpu system with NT 4.
:-(
:-(
...and those wonderfull guys at microsoft deciced to to make my system easier to use by hiding all the administration tools so I have to load all the aplets up manually in the mmc console (shudder) and everything is embeded in this tiny and ugly console browser and the only way to administer remote machines with this obnoxious tool is thru...YOU GUESSED IT! ACTIVE DIRECTORY!
:-(
There is no reason to use w2k server or even professional unless your an it professional who is expected to learn it(myself)
My old p150 with 64 megs of ram just can barely handle it in swap-file hell! Not to mention that there are so many hoops that the data goes thru, it slow down my actuall processing speed down to a crawl as well. I need to buy a 600 mhz althon (that I can't afford because I am entry level)with 256 megs of ram and a 20 gig hard drive just to learn it and not to actually do something usefull with it.
The sadest thing is that I didn't even load w2k advanced server because I know my system couldn't handle it.
Oh
Active directory can with only a few hundred users can easily saturate a 10 mps ehternet network and 100 mbps network is almot all gobled up by this piece of bloat.
I prefer NT 4 anyday and prefer to use pc-anywhere for support instead of active hell.
THis is just my experience with wk2 beta3 and rc1.
oh ya,, w2k can not use com 4 for some odd reason. IF you have a modem on com 4 then you need to change it to the other com ports and pray that there will not be any conflicts. Thanks Microsoft for taking away more valuable irq's and i/o ports by disabling com 4.
It is a Network Operating system. The original versions required a dos partition for installation and booting but never used dos for anything else. It has its on file system among other things. Version 5 installs on boot up (using a built in copy of DR Dos). It is the first to have the console one qui. A java interface that most people dont bother to use. To launch the qui you type start x from the prompt. I think one of the reasons it is not commonly now by most people (even though it still has a pretty large market share) is that outside of a network file/print/app server enviroment it is useless. That means it is not that fun to learn or use in comparison to other operating systems. It also did not go over well with developers because prior to 4.X all programs loaded in ring 0 of memory and had to be written in C. Running in ring 0 increases perfomance but it is also where the kernel resides. If your app is not bug free then it could take down the entire server... This usually manifests itself in novells equivelent of a BSOD the dreaded Abend!
Win2K Pro is great. Stability, performance, multimedia, power management, it's got it all. However basing your enterprise on Active Directory is nuts. NDS is the best, and will be for some time.
Lotus has a similar anti-MS FUD page up at http://www.lotus.com/home.nsf/welcome/itcentral1.
Apparently posting these rebuttals is required if you are in compeitition with Microsoft. RedHat better get ready.
What is the equivalent in the *nix world (if there is one)?
It was news a few days ago, but management made the determination that more Banner click-through revenue could be attained by putting all the Lawsuit articles up on the page earlier in the week. The algorhythms in the perl source that determine what news articles to pull out of the queue is a highly optimized part of the Slashdot code based on clickthrough statistics, etc.
Novell articles just don't bring in the revenue that lawsuit-about-DVD/MP3 articles do. But now it's the weekend and the dorm kids are sleeping off their Friday night drunk, instead of cutting class to reload Slash, etc. So it's Novell time, guys.
At my company of about 9000 people, we have been hearing about Win2K coming to our desktops in the very near future. There have been scripts that run at login to inventory all of the machines that are on the NT network, and it looks like reason has won out over some VP's insistence to go with the latest and greatest. Our Win2K deployment is off, and hopefully the IT wizards will push it off until Service Pack 2 or 3.
AND I hear OS/2's making a come back.
AND Amiga too!
I can't believe anyone these days even follows this.
If I were Novell I would be afraid of making everyone else in the world double over with laughter at this point.
It's over, ok? Give up.
Makes me glad we have AC accounts! Keep taking everything so seriously so trolls like me keep working harder!
./ readers of that age group are reading, hacking or whaterver, there peers are writing hate-filled shit like this and calling it religion.
seriously, tho, this little tidbit was an actual article written by an xtian extremist (and i mean extremist) of the tender age of 16.
so when the many
think about that, huh?
--
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
-- TM, who finds that Unix allows you to dodge the sticks, most of the time.
Well, the core of the OS runs on the main cpu, the others are only usable by aplications.
Netware is super super fast, it is an example of care and tuning, and not needing locks because only one cpu runs the kernel (yeah, I know, there are locks for other stuff no doubt).
The 3.x series could serve a file request in 53 x86 instructions! Top that.
This is Alan Cox's point that Linux beats Solaris on single CPU machines because it is efficent, but this is reversed on multi processor boxes because Solaris is scalable, taken to it's logical extreme. There is no userland (non ring 0) on a 3.x server, and it cuts performance in half on a 4.x machine if you use it (on Linux, the kernel runs in ring 0, everything else runs ring 3).
Netware is in many ways an anacronism, file and print, historically a horible aplication server.
Name the two OSs with no vm and no protected memory: Netware and Macintosh (this is way back when).
Netware is like Linux using loadlin, except you can quit to dos, or unload it and reclaim the memory (as linux does). Saing it is a dos app is like saying linux is if you use loadlin.
Plato seems wrong to me today
:) Quite right, fighting FUD with FUD... Microsoft didn't convince me on the BIND issue, or the LDAP implementation, but we'll see. "Standards-compliance" has always been iffy with them, just like NT is "POSIX-compliant".
:)"
Of course, we could apply the same tactics to basic facts, and I'm sure we'd get different responses to them.
"Did you know that Windows 2000 hasn't been released yet? Even though Microsoft has announced that it is finished working on it and has distributed it to certain major players, it is not publically available yet."
"Did you know that Netware 5 has been released? Even though Novell can't publicize a paper bag, it is possible to get a copy of Netware 5 now."
"Did you know that Microsoft traditionally does lousy disk caching anyhow? Defragmenting a drive on a Microsoft Operating System is better done under Linux. (tested with DOSEmu
"Did you know that the Earth is spiraling into the sun? Even though it's getting there very slowly, it will eventually become uninhabitable."
Incidentally, if you're running Windows, load up a copy of RegEdit, and change your Windows Tips. Now *that's* fun. "Do not, under any circumstances, eat the yellow snow"...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Pick up any "DataComm Warehouse" mag or go to there website (www.warehouse.com) or to CDW (www.cdw.com) and you can buy as much NetWare 3 & 4 as you like. Something make me think you didn't try _too_ hard to solve this problem...
...yellow number five, yellow number five, yellow number five...
*shrug* Novell have about one product worth mentioning, and that's NDS, which is actually very good. But other than that, NetWare is nothing more than a file and print server - people often mock Microsoft for running their GUI in kernel mode - NetWare runs entire applications in kernel mode, using NLM. Notice how almost every rebuttal published by Novell involves NDS, and also note that NDS is available for NT. Realistically, unless you're a legacy site, there are few reasons to choose NetWare.
I think we need to have more negative moderation to account for crap like this. It would be occasionally amusing if they weren't serious.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
actually... dos gets kicked out before novell gets started. but i agree with the fact that you can change a driver and replace a driver through dos. one of my biggest pet peeves with windows nt is that there is no command line accessible system configuration. if a driver gets caput and you can't get into the system, you have to use the rescue disk and still its 20 minutes until you see the light of day... if you do see it that is.
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
What's so new about this in reality? Companies have always fought FUD about their products with FUD about their competitors products. Is this really that much of a shock? Look at all those little surveys/studies that the automakers have commissioned. Most of them don't matter much in the overall performance you are going to get out of the car but yet they throw them out there over and over again.
:-)
I don't think anyone at Microsoft will be suprised at having FUD thrown at them. Just like other people are not surprised at Microsoft throwing it at them ALL THE TIME. Remember Sun maintains (or did I dunno if they stopped) a whole website soley dedicated to attacking NT for EVERY role. This isn't something new for MS. They've had more FUD thrown at them in the last 3 months regarding how the company was going to be broken up than most companies get in a year. It's just a different kind of FUD. (FUD comes in all shapes and sizes)
It can be REALLY fun to watch though. Particullarly when someone REALLY screws up.
I love marketers sometimes.
In the words of one Lt.Cdr. Montgomery Scott:
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
It was (until recently) loaded on top of DOS. It still only has a DOS-like shell with no decent text processing utilities. And until Netware 5, it used an outmoded proprietary network protocol. I don't know much about the latest version, but it still looks like something that came out of the ark. I suppose if you view it purely as an application server platform (rather than as a general purpose OS) it does its job well. But I prefer more flexibility and adherence to open standards than Netware has to offer.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Please moderate that up?
simply because NT can't handle the load of 25 users
??? thats amazing.. I do not advocate NT but if you are having problems like that then it sounds to me its operator error more than OS error.
While they battle it out, Linux, *BSD and other open source programs will be improving at a faster rate than either of those two could hope to achieve.
Finkployd
Bill Gates: "Innovation"
Well, they are the best references, but they really don't help with step by step procedures or things like that.
But it you need to know everything you can do with a grep command, they are easier to folow then the man page.
Bill Gates: "Innovation"
I'm talking market perception compared to Linux®, which is the belle of the ball in the media's eyes when it comes to the Unix world. I'm not slamming FreeBSD or debating which came first.
Linux® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Microsoft's document told us which Novell claims were untrue. Now it's your turn to tell us which Microsoft claims were untrue, and how they were untrue. Please be specific.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
For me, the biggest reason why it reminds me of DOS is that using more than one processor is useless. The current version of NetWare still, in the year 2000, doesn't scale past one processor. Of course they promise it will in the next version, but good luck.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
For a product to make a splash in the marketplace, as opposed to just receiving lukewarm acceptance, it needs hype. Take FreeBSD, for example. Despite being much better than Linux, it's Linux that's ridden the hype to become a big name, while FreeBSD has been relegated to "ugly stepdaughter" status, despite its obvious plusses for those who've used it. If you want your product to really take off, you simply cannot ignore the hype factor in the real world.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
If any MS product crashes BIND, then there's nothing stopping any hacker using any OS to send the same sequence to a BIND server to crash it. That would be like MacOS being vulnerable to the Ping of Death and then Apple not fixing it, but instead blaming the operating system which shipped a ping client which could produce it. Oh wait, I think they did do that for a while. ;-)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Have you priced systems lately? Frankly, it's a pain in the ass to find anyone who still sells systems that are too low-powered for Win2K.
For instance, the lowest-powered machine listed on the web site of that darling of Slashdot, VA Linux, is a 400Mhz Celeron with 64MB. Considering that my Thinkpad with a 266 Pentium MMX and 64 MB runs Win2K like a champ, I think your fears are unfounded.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
It's not a very long document. Since you're so against it, surely you can find some untrue claims by Microsoft in it. Put up or shut up, 'cause your credibility is going down the dumper.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Microsoft posted a response to Novell's FUD ata sp. You can overlook biased claims of "Ours is better. No, ours is!" by both sides, but Microsoft's document really shows how misleading, and in a few cases just plain made-up or wrong, just about all of Novell's claims were.
http://www.micr osoft.com/Windows2000/news/bulletins/novellpart3.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Just a note about X on NetWare 5.x, it is a port of XFree86 (3.3.x) to the Novell NLM format.
I didn't know that all NLMs run at ring 0, that explains a few things about why ABENDs can do so much damage. I just brought down our GroupWise server recently, I use Netscape Communicator to access my mailbox over LDAP and a corrupt message was causing the LDAP service to crash, which eventually (after about a dozen+ crashes) trashed the server. A quick reboot and all was well, but the admin refuses to run LDAP services anymore, sigh. I have to use the GroupWise client from Win98 in VMWare.
As a file serving NOS NetWare is excellent, we have heavily trafficed machines serving files to student labs with year+ uptimes. As an OS arch, though, it is pretty cryptic and crufty. Oh, I wish, wish that when Novell purchased UNIX from AT&T they would have ported NDS and NCP to it, and dropped NetWare OS. Then we could have an OS equally good at serving files, applications, and users (shell accounts, X11 workstations, etc).
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
They _do_ offer small licenses for home and demo use. I have a 3 license NetWare 5 server CD sitting on my desk that I got many moons ago. I'm sure that if you look around on their website you could find it (currently NetWare 5.1).
In my limited experience there is nothing better to serve Win9x/NT clients than NetWare/NDS/ZENWorks. I use it at a local Tech College and have been very impressed.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
No. You should be able to lie and try to confuse a piece of software all you want to. If it crashes, it is the software's fault. Then you grin and explain in the bug report how you did it. This is called testing.
It's BIND's fault if it ever crashes for any reason other than running on faulty hardware. Just like it's never a web page's fault when a browser crashes.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Well, actually, he was trying to use it as our apartment server, and the box is an Athlon K7 (700MHz) with around 128 Megs of RAM. As for "advanced" user, well... with the amount of hardware hacking he does (he's got 5 boxen, all of which he constantly swaps parts in for his purposes) and how amazingly un-friendly Plug & Pray is, he has learned more that a few tricks about handling Windows. It's just like any other sick, unruly, rabid animal... occasionally, the only solution it to drag it out back and shoot it.
Jurph
NDS is the reason that Netware 4 was a flop, since it didn't work.
BUT Netware 5 and NDS 8 are *extremely* stable (more than most on this forum would probably believe) --
Anybody hope that Active Directory kills W2K? I mean I can draw some significant correlations between a Domain and a Bindery, and the issues that arise from migrating 100 or so binderys into a single tree.. ack!
Does Only Windows 2000 Support Active Directory?
Active Directory is rapidly becoming the preferred directory for third party independent software and hardware vendors to directory enable their next-generation applications and devices.
Translated into plain-speak this answer means: we don't give a fsck! They expect everyone else to bend over backwards to interoperate with AD - and judging from the history they're probably right...
This happens all the time: two closed-source companies go at it.
We won't even get the benefits of amusing flamewars ala Linux vs. BSD
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
One of my servers is an old Dell Poweredge 2100/200 running a heavily patched Netware 4.11. I got the go ahead to buy a new Poweredge 4300 for which we were going to buy a 100 user Netware 5 license. However, Novell nearly doubled the price. Therefore, the 4300 will now be a Linux/Samba server for 80 or so Windoze clients. I think both of the "heavy weights" are far too expensive for small businesses and universities.
A
And those evil round DEC mice! Like hockey pucks they were! I felt dirty just holding one... The rollers were directly on the bottom w/o a ball. Sucked hardcore... it skipped and halted all the time... and compare that to Sun's optical mice... you just had to make sure you knew how to orient the steel micepads and you were good to go...
Digital was also one of the first to start with this PCI crap... I've never had machines as slow backplane throughput as these crappy PC164 and Ultra 5/10/etc systems... God I hate technological regression. By giving IT managers an excuse to buy 3rd rate cheap hardware, thats all we're getting nowadays... I have an *OLD* (built 1991) SGI 220/VGXT system that beats the crap out of my *BRAND NEW* Sun Ultra 10/elite3d system!!! Especially in 3D!!! What gives?!?!?!
Your nostalgia is biasing common sense...
"Nothing sucks like a VAX."
My question would be, why would you want to have a server product pre-installed? How many people out there trust a vendor far enough to run a pre-installed version of a server product?
Hell, my boxes don't even come built, let alone have a NOS pre-installed. (It's a fun day to have 10 to 15 boxes come in via UPS and get to sit down and put together a new server. I think of it as one of the perks to my job.)
I put em together, test em for a couple of weeks, install and configure the NOS, then roll them out.
Am I just to paranoid and untrusting or ???
-eddy
Get a life, you M$ troll. My 3.12 worked just fine with the free patches. I'll take Netware over NT anyday.
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
I admin that I am a linux newbie (only use it at home) and that I got my first experience running a 5 user LAN with Netware 2.2. I know my way around Netware. All we use the LAN servers for where I work is file and print. Novell did this with great simplicity, and on very little hardware.
fast forward a few years: working at Megacorp Inc., the Powers That Be decide NT should be our corporate standard. "We'll Save Money!" they said. We've saved boatloads of money. On the server I had to upgrade to support NT. On the server to be the BDC. On all sorts of things. I hate my job now thanks to M$. Using "User Manager" is a pain in the ass. I hate the idea that if my server room was not secured, and I didn't have it locked down, any moron could use the server as terminal. Just because NT is pretty, doesn't make it better.
Can you tell I am partisan? Sorry, but this is too true. I want the fsckers in my company to realize they made a HUGE mistake by moving to NT.
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
"they just need to take out a lot more full page ads and plant some employees to post to groups and handle reporters."
:)
Just like so many AC's here now
I have always hated the GUI on the server console. Damn that takes up so much resources (look at Task Manager) and realize what is wasted.
I, like you, come from a Netware background. NT is meant for the lowest common denominator, a dentists office. Any moron can turn it on. And it looks purdy. I can't say that Novell\Netware is meant to task so many things (We only used, and still use file and print) but it did it so well.
Novell let their guard down when NT 3.51 was out, and didn't think that 4.0 and the M$ marketing machine was much to worry about. Shame on them. But double shame on the corporate shills who listened to the sweetalk from M$.
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
Moderate the above comment up.
All I can say is that my experience is similar.
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
Novell says "If Microsoft will stop telling lies
about NetWare, we'll stop telling the truth about W2K."
Actually I have had good experiences with Groupwise for email & Border Manager for internet access. Netware can be a lot more than just file & print. Shame most people haven't seen what it is capable of.
Thank you!! That just gave me a really good laugh. Supporting both NT & Netware it was really funny reading some of their claims about Netware. I suppose by now we should all know not to believe anything the vendors say.
The company that I work at has ordered several server boxes with NetWare pre-installed, that's not to say we keep the installation. As soon as the thing is first powered on the first thing we do is wipe the drives and redo the drive/array and NOS setup.
I believe there is some what of a discount if we get the NOS bundled, and with the prices of NetWare's licenses every dollar counts =)
--
I support Novell over NT (I use, support and administrate both here at work) but what I think Novell fails to realize is that Microsoft is in their own little world.
so when MS says Novell doesn't support disk striping, it's MICROSOFT's definition of disk striping, not the industry standards definition of it.
Kinda like that kid in the schoolyard who hates losing so they keep changing the rules as you play to prevent them from losing.
well, be my guest. Try it then. Make a win95 bootdisk, and install netware with it. Have fun.
----------------------------------------------
the pun is mightier than the sword
sarducci? father guido sarducci???
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Wouldn't help. The differences are more basic than the command-line shell. Like changing bash to csh (I think. Greener than a newbie.)
The DOS structures are MS-DOS 5 (reports 5.5 IIRC), but NT will not allow the things that Novell does to DOS (at the ibmbio.com/ibmdos.com (io.sys/msdos.sys for MS) level).
Microsoft and Novell networking differ in at least one important aspect. Microsoft networking allows only one set of drive mappings. Novell (also Lantastic) supports a different set of drive mappings per task. This means it is possible to run together several tasks which have conflicting network drives under Novell DOS (Task Switcher!)* or MS Windows for Workgroups. Window 95/98/NT -- doesn't work anymore. If one task has access to a network drive, every task has the same access. Another Microsoft security innovation.
*Actually Novell DOS TaskMgr supports multitasking, but I've never used it.
This is for IIS 4 on NT4, but may help some poor sap trying to find it.
Microsoft Management Console. (Web server administration)
Start
Programs
Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack
Microsoft Internet Information Server
Internet Server Manager
I read the MS rebuttal. Seems to lack something. Like credibility.
"ugly stepdaughter" refers to Cinderella, and is probably more applicable to Linux. Berkeley Unix dates from the 70's if I'm not mistaken.
If there is more than one, ie TCP/IP, you are probably looking for trouble. To set up some print servers (LAN to Parallel ports) I had use use NETBEUI for one brand and later IPX/SPX for the other. In both cases the system was useable enough to set up the print servers, to TCP/IP, but was wonky enough that I got rid of the excess protocols fast.
Microsoft gets confused if it tries to do more than one thing at a time.
MS Proxy Server may be a problem. We had it. And junked it.
Remember to reapply your latest service pack if you change anmost anything.
Novell has integrity. Microsoft does not.
>>On my Microsoft call, I quickly learned that I knew more about networks in general than the supposed expert I was speaking with, and when I asked specific questions of him at different points, I usually got either the obvious "BS your way out of it" answer, or no answer at all. I found them to be remarkably impolite and of very little help at all.
Why am I not surprised?
Wait 'till W2K get tried out under real world loads. Giggle giggle.
I work in a large Netware envrionment (>100 servers), and our only gripe with Netware 4.x is the HUGE Vrepair times (18-20 HOURS). We have servers that stay up for months on end, but 90% of the time when we have to reboot, or when one abends, the vrepairs are what kill us.
...
We've actually moved some stuff off Netware servers to Sun boxes and NT because of lack of the 'vrepair'.
Thankfully, this issue has been addressed with Netware 5's NSS, which has 3-5 second VRepair times, but doesn't support some other things (at this time)
A problem that we've encounted with NW5 running PureIP is that we can't use Rconsole - we have to use JConsole (I think it's called) which is a Java based (read: SLOW!) remote console. It's normally faster to actually GOTO the server room now than loading the Java Console. Well, unless I'm trying to access my servers on the other side of the country. Until this is addressed, there is definatly some hostility towards using PureIP in our workplace as we do a lot of RConsole work. And since PureIP is one of Netware 5's big selling points
Thats all for my opinion - none of this represents my employers position, of course
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
It good to a least get it preinstalled, so you know all the hardware will work with the installation. It should always be redone though.
It does not mattter if M$'s implementation is crappy or not, if bind dumps core, it's buggy. With any software, if you input the wrong info, it should, at most, output an error code/message. Bind is buggy!
...
Yes, I know I ramble and my spelling isn't quite up to scratch. If you wish to complain,
My old school uses Netware(I still work there as a tech assistant.) It's NetWare 4 (would be 5 if not for all the macs we have to support) We have a BoderManager firewall, and 4 NetWare servers. It works great to manage all the WIN9x boxes on the network.
With another Novell addon (Zenworks) we're allowed complete, total and easy admin over all of the 600-700 workstations.
nope. i do the same. never use preinstalled stuff - always customise it. Its good security and you also know how the machine is set up. theres always *something* those preinstalled OSes dont get right...and how do you really know how many patches are installed etc etc.
what's so clunky about Netware?
Being a person who's had absolutely no experience with Netware (and who hates NT), I'd like to know what about Netware you're referring to when you say it's clunky, "DOS on wheels." I'm just. . . curious.
Insert mind here.
It is unbelivable how many systems that novell has trashed.. I work at a school part time and novell is the bane of my exsistance. I have no idea (please give me one) of what linux uses for a central user accounts. But im sure its better then this. I use a Win2k server and all the clients have to do is check "logon to domain" under the properties for Microsoft Client. And i was told that BeOS computers can logon to these domains (tho i highly doubt it). Can "unix" clients logon to AD servers? Doesn't matter. But i hate the novell client because it has a very retro feel. All the admin utilities do not have an easy gui and do not perform very well. You cannot get things done fast. Theres more but i'll just piss myself off. My school uses macs, old novell pcs (and some new), and nothing else. All i am asking for is for a little sanity. For instance, if they don't feel that NT is secure enough (compared to their macs) then they should use linux. MacOS with at ease is so fustrating! No one likes the macs at my school, why must they torcher us? I've also seen computers (including my precious laptop) fucked up when i tried to remove the Novell Client. I will never do it again.
(-1 offtopic. Oh well, I can afford the karma)
Your logic is flawed. The bible says that you cannot serve two masters. This is largely true, especially if they give conflicting orders.
However, it does not say that you must serve exactly one. There is a big difference between saying that (number of masters 2) and saying that (number of masters == 1). In this case, it is in fact possible to serve neither satan nor god.
Now, of course, at least to me, this is highly abstract and theoretical, since I don't believe in either one.
Novell's "Did you know" points are documented (usually by Microsoft themselves!) and appear to actually be based on fact. Here's FUD:
http://www.novell.com/advantage/ms_fud. html
Enjoy a good laugh!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I think they went with FAT 16 because all of the operating systems support it. Even in a NTFS NT /2k comparision, 2k's support for encryption may change the picture.
That said, Win2k as of the Beta 3 (not the release candidates) *feels* much faster than NT 4 on the same hardware.
Matt
I also know Novell has contributed a port of Apache to NetWare 5.1 to the Apache Group, and is releasing (closed source) NDS for Linux.
I guess Microsoft's done the ActivePerl stuff, and maybe some help with Samba (I don't know.) However, they've backed away from AD support on any non-MS system, and certainly have made no open source announcements about AD.
My point is is that both of these companies will respond to open source. Of course, I'd think Novell has more to gain/lose, so they're likely to be more agressive, while Microsoft is still in the "crush our competitors" analogy.
-- Of course I'm paranoid. I'm a sysadmin.
But hey, they had it coming. Everyone else has tried everything else, and it seems logic and reasoning (Not to mention superiority) won't get in M$'s way. The only thing left to do is attack 'em with their own guns, I say.
Too bad this means rebuttal and counterrebuttles galore until both products are released (And for a few months afterward, even). How many /. articles are gonna be taken up with this back-and-forth battle?
------------
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
yes, Novell is a true OS... it loads in much the same way that windows 9x loads. it loads DOS first, then when DOS has things set up correctly, it takes over, and gives you a true 32 bit OS. in a way, DOS acts like a boot loader, much like LILO, but a hell of a lot bigger...but back to the main point, it controls low level access to all of its devices... and once loaded, it dosent use DOS for any access to the hardware. Novell in my expierence is a very stable OS... I've never seen it lock solid (i've never used 5.x, only 4.11, 3.x), but it is kinda cryptic... if I used it regularly, I guess it wouldent be so bad, but I've never done that...
Drop me an e-mail at tdailey@novell.com and I'll get you on the beta list. It is closed beta right now, but there will be an open beta soon.
-Twid
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
They tried giving their stuff away, but I wasn't interested. I talked to a couple of other people who were on their list, and they did the same thing.
I did get a T-shirt, but it was pretty cheap. the POS had a hole in it after two weeks.
Novell can't even give their stuff away.
Too bad, so sad.
I've finally found the off by one erro
> ...The truth of this is evident with Judas Iscariot who pretended
> to love Christ, but in the end Christ's statement, "Did I Myself not
> choose you, the twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?", (John 6:70),
> proved correct when Judas betrayed Christ.
Evidently the original author of this lovely nonsense has never read Jorge Luis Borges's Three Versions of Judas (in the collection Ficciones).
> ...One does not hypocritically say they love satan, like many
> hypocritically say they love God.
Oh yeah? What about that opportunist Marilyn Manson?
By the way, this post of yours (which you admit down the thread is copied from some loony teenage zealot who - ho ho hee hee ha ha - actually meant it seriously) is screamingly funny. I laughed and laughed. I like to laugh, so thank you for posting, even though the only way this could get any further off-topic would be to post it in Etruscan.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
7-1/4?! Wow, imagine measuring it to fractional accuracy!
Mine used to be pretty big - well adequate anyway - but over a period of years the demoralizing effect of running exclusively Microsoft operating systems all day long shrunk and withered it to the point...let's not go into the dismal, humiliating details.
But then, at the last moment when I was wallowing in impotent despair and I had given up hope, I stumbled upon this book with a Slackware CD bound inside the back cover. Though I was listless and apathetic, I installed it anyway, and instantly I beheld the mighty majestic bash command-prompt, my luck changed. After just a few rounds of Doom I could feel my BFG9000 getting a full load of shells, so to speak.
By gee, I'm still quite the Linux new-B, but at least as far as my unit goes, I've made a full recovery, and the future looks even brighter than ever! Thank you, thank you, and thank you again, RMS and Linus and the whole penguin-lovin' GNU crew, thanks to you-all ah'm a reel man again!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
And remember folks, Linux advocates never engage in FUD, this is strictly a province of large "evil" companies.
;)
Anything anti-microsoft that is spewed from advokiddies is always regarded as well informed truth, never can a Linux advocate be accused of mud slinging
"Yes, my friend's NT workstation crashes 30 times per day, devours babies, and sends your mother's credit card numbers to microsoft in it's spare time"
Open source. Closed minds. We are Slashdot.
Novell's Claim: "Did you know that Windows 2000 DNS server will CRASH just about every non-Microsoft DNS server in existence? Only the very, very latest versions of BIND (which aren't widely deployed) won't crash when interacting with a Windows 2000 server."
t ins/novellpart3.asp
:(
Microsoft's Perspective: Microsoft recognizes the need to work well in non-Microsoft DNS environments and would not release a product that crashes in such a way. Moreover, Novell has not provided any factual evidence of these claims, and does not explicitly mention which versions of BIND may crash when interoperating with the Windows 2000 DNS Server.
Microsoft has tested Windows 2000 for DNS interoperability with the following:
Active Directory with BIND 8.1.2
Microsoft DNS (client & server) with BIND 4.9.7, 8.1.2 and 8.2
It is also important to note that the Internet Software Consortium (the developers of BIND) makes the following recommendation because of known problems with versions of BIND other than 4.9.7 and 8.2. (Refer to the ISC Web site):
"If you are running a version of BIND prior to 8.2.2 patchlevel 5, we recommend you upgrade to the current version for security reasons. If you cannot upgrade, we recommend you use BIND Version 4.9.7 rather than any lower 4.x releases. It is possible to obtain older versions of BIND; they are, however, provided for reference only and should not be used."
http://www.microsoft.com/Windows2000/news/bulle
of course, since this isn't a anti-MS lie it will be moderated down
We run Netware 4 and 5 at our shop and a few months back tried upgrading to Windows 2000. It was a nitemare and I'm sure glad we did it on a test subnet instead of the whole thing. Not only did W2k break the DNS servers we use externally but it's Active directory shit killed the NDS we had working. It was like a pervasive virus that just sucked up resources (saturated our 100 mb/s switches with replication data) and we started having login problems where none existed before! Amazing that this crap actually made it out of beta (or, hmmm, maybe it didn't!)
The Novell claims against this MS crap are legit and should be required reading for anyone considering ruining their existing network with this Windows 2000 crap!
now, if I can only get more of those netware boxes running linux... netware makes for a decent file/printer server but just sux when it comes to internetworking. Netware 5's IP support is weak, incomparable to any Linux implementation!
Anyway, I'm happy to stick with my Open Source stuff, thank you very much.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
can't you run them under "command.com" in nt?
that last comment i made was uncalled for.
;\
sorry. guilt caught up with me
NT has CMD.EXE a command interpretor, but it also comes with command.com (c:\winnt\system32) for running old DOS programs.
Even windows 2000 comes with command.com.
Maybe you should try to know what you're talking about before saying anything.
Right now, if you are using Win2k to connect to a NT4 network, you must go through 5 sublevels in the Network Neighborhood to get to the NT4 shares. You cannot add NT4 printers either, because they are not served by a Win2k domain space. Yes, you can make shortcuts once you eventually find the NT Domain you were looking for, but it makes things more difficult when using network installs, etc.
Novell's problem will be that Active Directory can handle domain-wide auto logins, and manage disk quotas, email, and webspace all across a domain on a per-account basis. This is a boon to SysAdmins. The latest Novell can do this too I believe, but the rationale is why buy an 3rd part system to do something which is possible with the newly upgraded resources at hand? It will be an uphill battle against media hype/buzz and quick-thinking IT admins.
"In individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." -Nietzsche
Anyone remember the Linux benchmark fiasco?
M$ has a tried and true history of stating blatant falsehoods in their many FUD campaigns. Why are we labelling Novell's responding to such false allegations (as in the NDS cannot support more than 1000 objects, when it will hold a billion) as FUD instead of as defending themselves just as *nix/Linux users have been doing for so long?
So far, I have yet to find anything untrue on any of Novell's alleged "FUD" pages.
Shouldn't Novell be viewed as a sort of "brother in arms" when their trials and tribulations with the M$ media machine are compared to Linux's own?
-Jake
Actually, Oracle 8 ships with Netare 5. It handles databases quite well. It's application serving that has traditionally been its weak point, and where they have welcomed NT. They've also recently partnered with IBM for new Java-based app serving to attempt to correct that oversight of theirs.
BorderManager is an excellent webserver, and kicks IIS's ass (as if that's difficult to do, really). I'm curious why you believe it to be so bad.
As far as the GUI interface, well, that's because end-user mgt make decisions, and it looks just like their every day desktops...so why not go with that thingy!?
But, you're right about marketing. Novell is destined for extinction if all they continue to do is rest upon their laurels as they have done. When was the last time you saw a Novell magazine ad, ad banner or television commercial? Who was the last Novell executive to be interviewed on the Today show?
Outside of LAN admins, nobody knows Novell. Hell, even Linux and FreeBSD are more recognizable than the Novell! They are so lacking in self-promotion it's pathetic.
Yeah, the ad thing is horrible. I mean, I'm obviously a Novell gan, but it's hard to support an underdog that doesn't even tout itself in the same media as its competitors... Oh, I'm not shocked about BM not being listed. Again, who, other than admins, knows about it? About their site, well, recently they switched providers. I think their backbone is now...hang onto your CNE...GoodNet! You can't get good performance from a a shitty backbone. -Jake
Even the old bindery days of Novell are better than this AD shit. I'll give you an example.
Take a statewide network, make a change to a user account's ACL in NDS and the repicas make the information known to the network. In ADS, it's a fucking file copy. So, take that statewide network, make a 4bit file grow to 11 megs by the end of it's travels as it updates all the servers because M$ doesn't like partioning replicas based on geographic location.
That is a mighty fine piece of coding there, huh?
Retro feel? Are you, or are you not using NWAdmin32? If you're still on 3.12 or 3.2, then you're still not stuck with the old syscon interface, you moron. Go and download WinSyscon and quit your M$ GUI-dependant bitching!
As far as removing the client, try using the appropriate UNC32.exe to uninstall the client. If you knew what you were doing, or bothered to look things up, then you'd not have fucked up your laptop.
You're A+ certified, aren't you?
(1) Novell can't seem to market its product well enough - consequently people have used NT and are used to it. The completely GUI interface for NT appear friendlier than the text menus in Netware, even though Netware is really easy to use, especially for those with *nix experience.
(2) Microsoft is much better positioned for eCommerce with IIS. The biggest market today and tomorrow is the web, which M$ has recognized and has therefore developed a widely accepted web server.
M$ can throw around all the FUD they want - it won't make Active Directory perform any better. When AD performs as well as NDS, Novell is finished.
Fortunately for us, Linux will replace them both. :-p
Border Manager may be better than I have heard, but I don't know anyone who has run it and been impressed. Novell's site frequently returns weird errors and fails to load pages. Maybe that is just due to a really high number of hits but I kinda doubt it. Remember that recent /. article that listed the popular web servers? Border Manager wasn't even listed. Again probably due mostly to bad marketing. I would expect Apache to continue as the predominant web server, and Novell to fall even further behind unless I see an add *somewhere* and *soon*.
This, of course, is only anecdotal evidence, and should be taken as such.
Hate to reply to myself...
;-)
Whoops... clarification: Perhaps the Open Source community was *a bit* more analytical in their rebuttal of Microsoft's allegations...
Basiclly, it's a cool and easy way to keep track of everything connected to your network - servers, harddrives, workstations, routers, you name it. LDAP is an lighter version of a directory service, but for *nix-based operatingsystems , NDS is the answer. It's available for Solaris, Linux and HP-Ux, to name but a few. Check it out. Microsoft's gonna get their asses kicked if they think that they can compete against NDS. There is a good reason that Cisco, Bay and a few others dropped their support for Active Directory and choose to work with Novell and NDS instead - Novell came out with NDS like seven years ago, and surely, it didn't work so well at first but you gotta remember that a directory service like NDS is rilly rilly complicated and now that NDS 8 is out, most of the bugs are gone and it works great. Microsoft will never be able to make a working, scalable, stable and secure directory service in it's first release. I wonder why they still haven't showed it...
-- http://z80.org - all opinions, all the time --
The real fight isn't about the operating system itself - that is an obsolete way to think. The real fight is about the directory - Novell really couldn't care less if they sold less Netware licenses, but NDS is where the money is in the future. Novell supports all major platforms and vendors with NDS so they can be pretty sure to make money anyhow. And yes - Netware 5.1 rules.
-- http://z80.org - all opinions, all the time --
The O'Reilly books get a little bit spotty where it comes to BSD internals. You have to branch out to McKusick and Jolitz's books. I'd say adding Prentice Hall, Addison Wesley, and a few smaller publishing houses to the list fleshes it out, though.
Novell will continue supporting NetWare 3.2 for some time, thought.
Roy
Computers are like air conditioners.
- They stop working when you open Windows.
that page says it is an earlier version of bind so i guess that the recent version must work fine now
I believe that you have the freedom to choose a better job(?)
NDS is a directory service. It contains and replicates all information about network users, groups, computers, and other resources on the Net.
NDS uses its own authentication mechanism as well as standard LDAPv3 authentication. ADS uses Kerberos and might even use standard LDAPv3 as well. I should try it sometime using the JNDI LDAP providers we use just to see for myself.
NDS uses multimaster replication, which enables you to have multiple directory masters on your network sharing and updating information. This means all directory information looks the same, no matter from which server you are connected to.
Multimaster replication is very nice for running a large company, as it guarantees referential integrity of all your directory information, no matter how big the company or how physically disparate are your branch offices.
Note that referential integrity is part of NDS: it has no "404 Not Found" equivalent.
NDS V8 scales up to a billion objects in the database, so you could theoretically create user objects for everyone on Earth in six or seven directories, although I would probably just use the two or three NDS servers in my house. =)
We announced NDS for Linux, so you will be able to run it on your favorite Linux distro and redirect all authentication requests into NDS.
Sorry if I sound like an informercial--I live this stuff.
Hope that helps.... =)
............ kris
Kris Magnusson
Open Source Architect
Novell, Inc.
Coauthor, Java Enterprise in a Nutshell
O'Reilly & Associates
"I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me."
Yeah - I like this one. Perhaps Dynamic DNS doesn't work right with other DNS implementations - that's probably microsoft's fault. But come on...usually when a program crashes on bad input, we call that a bug. At least when it's microsoft's product that's crashing...:-)
Microsoft recently had a few documents on their web site that were so close to false advertizing it wasn't funny. They were comparing Windows 2000/Active Directory with the original version of NDS that shipped with Netware 4.0 years ago. They didn't even compare it to the standard 7.x NDS versions most places are using, never mind the new (available for nearly a year) NDS 8/eDirectory product. They were stating limitations of the original NDS like they applied to current offerings. They pulled the articles pretty quickly, but that's been a standard tactic as well. Lie and then say "Whoops! Didn't mean it."
Microsoft decided to compare NT 4 (and the not-even-in-beta Windows 2000) against old versions of Netware (not Netware 5, which was available) a bit over a year ago as well.
They've been pulling this garbage for a couple of years now, and Novell's been trying to take the high road. Well, there's no way to take it when you have Microsoft basically making false statements and having their sales weasels calling the more uninformed upper tiers of companies and making rather dubious statements. Like when they tell gov't sites that NT is certified C2, even though the version they're selling isn't. (Not that it hugely matters, but it does call into question their honesty).
This is HILARIOUS! Really disturbed, but HILARIOUS!!
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
That's why I depend on Slashdot - to point out all the unbiased reviews of Microsoft products.
This IS /. , "FUD for Nerds. Stuff that makes Microsoft look bad."
But is there any serious way to get some sort of independent analysis which rates the two products? I know no one here is a fan of Microsoft, but if Novell has to resort to the same sort of FUD MS is using, does that necessarily make them better? Linux (or BeOS, hehe) don't need FUD to make them stand out, they stand out on their own...
No one I know is begging for the update to Win2k. Anyone know if anyone is begging to update to Novell Netware 5?
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
[o]_O
Where can one download the beta NDS for Linux? I have checked Novell's site and it just had a press release. Is the beta closed?
Any word on what the costs will be for NDS? Will it be open source?
Probably yes, because I do have tried it, Server edition. Maybe I had to disable more services, but it crashed on my Riva 128 and it couldn't use my PCI NE2000 NIC, so I didn't want to make too much work of it anyway.
It's a good idea, let's hope they'll get some market back. But now they're slashdotted...
You must be having quite a expensive system if you want to upgrade... It's almost as slow as Windows 95 on a 40MHz 386, on my system. (233MHz 64MB)
No, I'm not exaggerating...
Y2K fixes for NetWare??? Why??? I have a Netware 3.11 server running, and it still works, just like last year. No problem. So Novell at least knows that fixing a problem that doesn't even exist is not necessary.
But that's not the point. Microsoft really deserves some negative attention. They deserve a taste of their own medicine. I don't think this will help Novell much, but with the US DoJ vs Microsoft in the news, plus a FUD campaign against the Windows line, managers will definitely think twice before using W2K. Novell's reasoning behind this is: "If there's less people using Windows, there's more people using NetWare." Though I don't think that will happen, it will have people seriously looking at alternatives.
This problem does exist, it is Microsofts fault, the culprit is Dynamic DNS, Microsofts pitiful combination of WINS/DNS. It pretty self explanatory but it doesn't work with legacy DNS (read BIND) so you are basically up the creek if you want to keep existing DNS servers and use Active Directory/DDNS. Active Directory doesn't work without DDNS. Win2000 promoting a heterogenous network environment, no, I think not.
It should be fun watching these two heavy weights battle it out. Maybe we could sell tickets.
There were fixes for Netware 3 and up. If you don't want the new features of Netware 5+, then don't buy them - you can still buy Netware 3 and 4.
I'm both an MCSE and an CNE4, and I really really really really hate Microsoft's pathetic networking model of Domains and crap. DNS is far superior to NT's domain model. Now comes Active directory. I honestly haven't worked much with it yet, but I do know that it's basically an upgraded domain model. There's still domains etc etc, and it's crap. There are many reasons I hate NT's networking, but I'm not going to go over that here as much as I'd like to. When Novell officially releases NDS for Linux, I really hope the Linux community embraces it. It's far superior to Active Directory, and we certainly are not going to AD for Linux from Microsoft anytime soon or ever as it's basically a hacked up Domain model - which is crap. Check out http://developer.novell.com/ and check out the programming API. Hopefully it will be available for Linux soon!
Is Netware a true Operating system? I have a copy of Beta 5 and I never installed it...doesn't it need DOS to run? I was never too sure of what Netware really was...a hybrid glue to make extranneous OS's happy in banks? (That's the only place I've seen Novell honestly)
Is it a true standalone os?
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
The company that took OS/2 away from MS and continued to develop the platform dumped it internally a couple of years ago. They have been a Win shop ever since. By the 4th quarter of this year they plan to be running WinY2K corporate wide.
Netware 5 will support tcp/ip natively, so stop bitching about IPX not being an "open standard".
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I used win2k professional RC3 for a few months and it never crashed or blue screened. It was probably just as stable as linux. Then again I've never had any bad crashes on my system, two celeron 333's overclocked to 500. The only thing that happens is it locks up while playing unreal tournament, which is kind of expected considering my cpu's.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I would have smacked the teeth out of my bosses mouth had he said that. Just the 512meg of ram, christ. That onyx they are using sounds pretty sweet too.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
There is no Netware v3.5, are you real? Or are you just making this up. Fool.
------
Would you really want untrained persons administering your Net-connected LAN?
Take an NT guy and put him in front of a Linux box...
Or take your UNIX admin and put her in front of an NT box...
I think you can see where I'm headed with this. If you make it so simple that training is not needed, you wind up with something that provides no real value. If you build something that can do useful work, you'll need to be trained how to use it properly!
Sure, you can just sit down in front of the terminal and start typing away, but you'll not be getting the full benefit from the product.
Every software product requires training (in some fashion, whether that be classes, books, or whatever) to use properly. Especially servers.
--
We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
This is why we need the anonymous logins...
it seems quite amusing to have a company like novell which provides file/print, etc. services mainly to win 95/98/nt/2k environments locking horns with ms. were it not for ms, novell would not really have a reason to exist. they are now trying to diversify, by pushing products like groupwise (which is significantly below par in comparision to the two opensource imap servers on *nix boxes), but their bread and butter was dependent and ms client machines. their macintosh support has waned as their os has matured. i will re-affirm that nds is a wonderful thing, and the products that they have make use of it in and extremely elegant fashion, but novell would do well to support other clients as well as it does ms ones. they do have nfs support, but it is not done terribly well and there are very strict conditions for nfs services on a netware volume. zen works is a wonderful tool, but again it is a windows only tool. they should at least support the mac. a little diversification would allow them to tap into other markets and leave them less vulnerable to FUD.
Wrong about no one knows what AD is. Novell has worked side by side with Microsoft for a long time now and knows AD as good as Microsoft does. They have tested it and made clients for NDS and integrated AD into NDS so they probably knows a great deal about it. A fact is that it STILL is domains, buried under a tree ontop, hence the strange DNS "adjustments".
One very solid point in the Novell page: Lotsa businesses that plan to change over to Windoze 2000 will be waiting at least a year before taking the plunge. That's a *very* good idea: Let others pay technical staff to read bug tracking literature and apply functional and security patches on a week to week basis, until a more stable build comes out. That's what I would be pushing for, with a strictly cost-based argument, if my management insisted on getting Win2K.
I know this is a bit offtopic but anyways...
My employer made the uninformed decision to "upgrade" all of our servers (both Netware 4.11 and Solaris 2.5.1 as well as an older Onyx system) to Win2K when it becomes available. I'm on the system admin team, and I'm seriously thinking of leaving. Another note about the management there is that they're total assholes... When we decommissioned a SPARCserver 690MP (4x180MHz, 512MB RAM) and two SPARCstation 10s they fucking *SMASHED* it up and basically trashed pretty much everything internally. The SIMMs were broken, CPUs crushed, HDs smashed (4x18GB diff SCSI in the 690... grrr)! They claim they do this because of high school kids digging in the trash, what a load of BS. This company sucks. I'm sure the same fate will happen to the other stuff when it goes...
RANT OFF
If you don't use a directory service, you'll never know what it is. With NDS, I can move people from Sales in NY to Sales in CA with a drag and drop. So when they arrive in CA on Monday morning, their ID is the same and their password is the same and all of their files are waiting for them. They grab a local PC and login (as I said, same name, same password) and they're busy making money again. Try that with any other login scheme. And with Zen, I can push the apps they need to their PC. It will take longer to login the first time, but they will have EXACTLY what they had in NY. Now, security, in the *nix world we have USER, GROUP and WORLD. Under NDS, you can have as many groups with permissions to your directory as you want. And they can all have different rights. And the rights are more granular. Now, extend those rights to people and departments and geographical locations. I can give someone in NY the rights to change NY employee's passwords so I won't be woken up 3 hours early when they get to work. But this guy might have no other rights to add or delete users or their files. But I can give someone in Sales the rights to add/delete salespeople. But no rights to change passwords. That means that the ENTIRE tree can be managed by ME but each location will be managed locally and those people can ONLY manage their location. That way, if Joe in NY is killed by a cab, I can handle his job from my office in CA until we get a replacement. And if I'm killed in an earthquake, each location can handle itself until I'm replaced. I can give your boss full rights to your files and I can give his boss full rights to his files. But HIS boss will not have any rights to YOUR files. That way your boss can monitor your work and his boss can monitor his work but his boss has to go through him to get to your work. Or however I want to set it up.
The problem will be that the executives will read how "...ActiveDirectory is just like NDS..." on their airline magazines and then come down and tell the computer people to dump Novell since Microsoft can give them the same thing. It took a year for NDS to get stable enough to use (I know - we tried), and I'd expect no less for ActiveDirectory. But, try explaining that to management.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Sales of Novell's NOS have doubled over the past 12 months.
Both users are very happy.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
The page quotes zdnet as follows:
"We've known for the last year that corporate America is taking a wait-and-see attitude towards Windows 2000, but the fact that well over half have no plans for adopting Windows 2000 until 2001 or later and that a large percent of users plan never to migrate starts to look like a sea change."
This industry, for all it's speed, has no memory of history. I remember the exact same type logic for NT4's release. And look what happened.
The reason that win2k will beat out Novell for the marketing is that new computers will come shipped with it. You won't be seeing dell having a check box for 'pre-install Novell 5'. You will see one for Win2k. IIRC, you can see it now, for a BETA! Microsoft will win this war with novell due to it's control of the OEM's. And novell doesn't have the popularity to force OEM's to change, like they did for linux.
In 1 year, or more likly 4 months, you won't be able to buy a computer with NT4 on it. Then companies will either have to upgrade everyone to maintain compatability, or downgrade the new boxes. For workstations, people won't like getting a 'downgraded' box, and will complain, and eventually get win2k.
Unfortunatly, it's not about supperior products.
Zapman
They DID have a patchkit. It was about 31 NLM replacements and a patch for SERVER.EXE. I know because I installed it on a server.
BTW - Novell 3.2 was basicly 3.12 with Y2K patches.
http://www.novell.com/advantage/ms_fud. html
I personally think that Novell seriously blew it by only NOW announcing their campaign against Windows 2000 Server editions.
Mostly because Novell should have been doing this like early 1999 when NetWare 5.0 first came out. Instead, Novell gave time for Microsoft to rev up their Windows 2000 PR bandwagon, and NetWare 5.0 got ignored by way too many IT managers as a result.
Also, don't forget that Novell is also getting punted all over the place by the rapid rise in Linux for use in departmental servers. Mostly because Linux costs a tiny fraction of what NetWare 5.x costs to purchase, especially for medium to large workgroups. In my personal opinion, the success of Linux servers has hurt Novell far more than Microsoft, especially since Linux has Samba, which allows easy integration to workstations running Windows 95/98 and NT 4.0 Workstation from any Linux server machine.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
No problem. Your post was highly informative, mine wasn't...for obvious reasons. But I'd still contend that Novell missed the boat. It still looks clunky because it's not Unix and it's not Windows. Is there even room for another mass-market server platform these days?
The world has moved on; computing is now a much bigger arena than it was in Netware's day, and a large proportion of our computing infrastructure now depends upon services originating from Unix. With Netware 5 they've tried to drag the product into the internet age (like so many other proprietary platform vendors) by adding TCP/IP and making it into a web server platform. You have indicated some scepticism about the latter. I agree, Netware is unlikely to make it as a web server platform because it has no pedigree as such and there is strong competition in the market already.
But then, if Netware is destined to be remain purely as a file-and-print server then who needs it? This is the basis of my complaint that it's not a general purpose OS. Almost all network installations these days require more than just file and print services. All existing requirements can be met with either Unix or NT or a combination of both. Introducing a third platform means requiring sysadmin skills etc. for it in adddition to the other two. It's hard to imagine that any incremental benefit would outweigh the additional cost of network complexity.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Actually I have had good experiences with Groupwise for email & Border Manager for internet access.
That's funny, because I've had experience with those too and I think they suck. Groupwise is about as reliable as MS Exchange, i.e. not very reliable at all. I even had my whole account mysteriously disappear forever one time. Border Manager (because it is designed for dummies to use) is very easy to misconfigure. Ever find yourself behind a firewall which blocks out far more than is necessary - because the sysadmin doesn't know *anything* about the internet? These things should not be made *too* simple to use because then you have simple people using them.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think they went with FAT 16 because all of the operating systems support it.
That would be a completely bogus reason to cripple the more capable systems. After all, the file system speed does contribute to the overall system speed in a "real world" deployment.
IMHO, using FAT16 on the NT and 2K boxes means this isn't anything like a real world test. Yet another demonstration of MS incompetence.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
it always seemed that everything they did was designed to make it harder for NetWare servers to operate with Windows workstations properly and I admire Novell for overcomming all the burdens that M$ laid in their path. As far as I remember Novell was silent about these things, but all the admin could experience them heavily
I absolutely agree. One of the most frustrating things is that WinNT's command line cannot run Novell command-line utilities. Of coruse, MS would innocently shake their heads and say the utils were written for DOS and CMD.EXE is not DOS -- but at the same time they would tout NT as a respectable partner in Novell-based networks. Very frustrating; you were limited to using the GUI tools (point click ad infinitum) or keeping an extra workstation around to run the command-line stuff.
(Why the hell couldn't MS write a REAL dos emulator for NT? It wasn't just Novell that would benefit. Morons.)
Essentially, Microsoft seemed to have a strategy of getting NT into an organization (e.g. as a SQL server), in effect touting the benefits of a mixed organization, then to turn around tout an all-MS environment as superior to a mixed one. They certainly didn't bend over backwards to make them play nicely together.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
They do. There are books on Netware admin which come with licence-restricted copies of Netware 5.
A directory service is very similar to NIS+ in the Unix world. It creates a central place for managing all user accounts.
.htaccess logins are also authenicated against NDS. I hate having 26 different passwords on different systems. Did I mention NDS can also manage how many systems a person can be logged into?
Though NDS is so far ahead of where NIS could ever be, specifically with regards to replacting the data, and sharing/exporting it into other formats such as LDAP.
Its also important to mention that unlike Active Directory, NDS is *NOT* platform centric, it can operate perfectly fine on a network without any netware boxes.
For example I operate a small e-commerce firm we have 3 Sun E250's and about 100 Linux boxes which run on Compaq proliants, we have *no* netware servers. But when I delete a user he disappears from all the systems, when I add a user I get to pick which groups (systems) he has access to. When he changes his password, the password changes on all the systems. Its a nice pretty java interface to manage the whole thing, its a bit slow under Linux but it runs well under CDE.
NDS links into the PAM (Password Authentication Module) and really takes the headaches out of syncronizing passwords, etc.
Right now we're just bringing up our Intranet webserver so all
I know your wondering what happens if NDS goes down? (to be totally honest I have no clue, since it hasn't happened yet) but its supposed to read the local password file, we removed the root user and gave another "secret" user a root login, just enough access so I could reclaim the box if necessary, but NDS has been extremely reliable for us!
I think we might have had more issues if we ran NDS on Netware since I think Netware is a poor excuse for an operating system. We're playing with the idea of running Netware for the marketing people so we can use ZenWorks to manage their workstations, Novell ZenWorks rocks, but it requires Netware.
FYI: The linux verion of NDS isn't out yet, but i'm running the beta and it seems fine.
I stand corrected.
NT doesn't have a command.com, it has a cmd.exe
I wish I had a fscking choice! :(
The company I work for (a major Cable/Communications company employing nearly 20,000 people) is preparing to "upgrade" every single computer to Win 2000 and Office 2000. It makes me physically ill to even think about it. Microsoft's reps are pushing it to the hilt, too. Offering any discount necessary to "lock in" all of us to Win2000.
Unfortunately, I am in no position to push for an Open Source alternative to this mess.
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
It not only uses DOS as a bootloader, it uses it all the way. And not only that, it _needs_ dos 6.
Any newer version of dos, (eg from win95), will load netware, but causes major problems in any Novell server 3/4/5.
----------------------------------------------
the pun is mightier than the sword
Microsoft has to do the big advertising blitz precisely because Windows is an established product.
Businesses will not undertake an upgrade lightly - the cost per system can easily hit several kilobucks after you include the Win2k upgrade license, the third party product upgrades (for products that break under W2K), the IT staff to install the software, the staff to retrain employees, the lost productivity of employees in training classes and for the next N days, etc. Few shops will pay less than $1000/system to upgrade, some might pay upwards of $5000/system.
These upgrades tend to be "all-or-nothing" affairs. While you could run one group under NT4 and another group under W2K, that involves a duplication of effort that might be more costly than simply pushing everything over to the new OS. Again, that is a strong disincentive to upgrading quickly, esp. with Microsoft's hard-earned reputation for poor quality initial releases. Few IT managers will rush to upgrade today... and twice again in the next six months as service packs are released.
So the target audience of W2K knows that the cost of switching is significant - and the cost of the software license is only a small part of the total. They have to be convinced that the cost is worth it - and that's where the advertising blitz comes in.
As a secondary effect, don't forget that some managers will be comparing the cost of upgrading from NT4 to W2K (esp. if it requires a major hardware upgrade) to the cost of switching from NT4 to Linux. I'm sure a lot of the marketing will focus on how much is the same (low cost of transfer), not how much is different (so the cost of conversion to Netware or Linux is comparable to the cost of conversion to Win2K).
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
True Story.
I had a job as a network engineer once in a hospital. There was a netware server (V3.5) that had 200+ users on it and it also managed a bunch of printers. One day I had to add another hard drive to it because the old one was running out of space. The entire operation took about a half hour but the actual donwtime was more like 15 minutes. That was the only downtime for that server in two years. Here is the kicker.
It was a 486 with 16 megs of ram (an IBM using Micro channel!).
War is necrophilia.
"MORE stable than our Linux boxes ont he same hardware"
Care to provide some examples? It may in fact be true, but no one is going to believe baseless claims unless you at least back them up.
Please tell us where the beta for NDS for Linux is. I work in a Novell shop and have several Linux servers that I'd love to do NDS sync on.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I think it's time for a reality check. Sure, everyone and their mother is talking smack about W2K. Sure, I see online publications everyday saying how companies "are not planning to upgrade to W2K until 2001" or "are taking a wait-and-see approach." But let me give you a real world example of how this is all hot air.
A few months ago, I tried W2K, RC2 I beleive it was, at work. So I called my bosses and IT managers and they looked at it, and said it was all right, but, to paraphrase, "we cannot justify upgrading to it, because there is no reason to." Ie, if it ain't broke (our NT4 network) don't fix it. Fast forward 2 months, and those same bosses come up to me and say "good news, we're gonna be ordering a new W2K server soon." WTF happened?! I'll tell you what happened, Hype. Microsoft sells one thing and one thing only, and that is the _word_ "Microsoft." They make point-and-click admin's like my bosses (and every other MCSE, NT admin, etc) beleive with all their heart (and purchasing buck) that MS is the only game in town, and one should get all their newest stuff ASAP.
I firmly beleive that's what will happend. Online publications be damned, opinions be damned, caution be damned, W2K is gonna sell like hotcakes. Novell FUD? Please... There's only one FUD source anyone listens to.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
60 people for a marketing team for a company the size of Novell is a joke. What is their yearly gross revenue? I worked at an AIR CONDITIONING company which had a yearly gross of $50 mil or so that had 5 marketing people (and I considered that small). I know people here think marketing is a joke, but COME ON. The best product in the world is useless if nobody ever figures out it's the best product.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
They were never entirely killed off. They released Novel 5 a while back.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I think this just shows you how much the computer industry has changed. In the '80s t was all about who had the better technology. The company who spent more money on R&D would win customers. Now today it seems that companies are worrying more about politics than developing actual companies.
Oh, yeah right. DEC had demonstrably better products than Sun did in the 1980's, for example, but Sun won out. Handily. And you know why? Because nothing has changed. Sun was better at producing FUD than making computers, and DEC had very poor marketing but top notch engineering. Sun published all sorts of FUD which was just plain wrong like "The Sun 3/60 is ten times as fast as the MicroVAX II". Yeah. FUD has been going on since the beginning of the industry - this is nothing new. It's actually rather tame now compared to what has happened in the past.
This isn't unprecedented or uncalled-for by any means. Microsoft struck first - with their "informative" article entitled "Windows 2000 Server: A Prime Choice over Novell's Netware 5.0", similar to their "Linux Myths" article and (my favorite) "How to remove Linux from your computer and install NT".
Novell is responding just like the Open source community did to the "Linux Myths" article. What are they supposed to do? Stay quiet and take it like a man? Of course, this just increases the FUD-to signal ratio.
What kind of reply would anyone here like to have seen?
Or, in South Park-speak:
[A commercial is playing]
Guy: What is the future of America? Is it the money we make?
[A dollar flies by the screen]
Guy: The quests we conquer
[Shot of Neil Armstrong on the moon flies by]
Guy: No. It's the children.
[Shows a pic of the five boys]
Guy: So what do the children have to say about Microsoft?
[Kyle's head flies by]
Kyle: I don't like big corporations.
[Then Stan]
Stan: I like small businesses.
[Then Cartman]
Cartman: I believe in the family owned enterprise.
[Kenny]
Kenny: To get back to the home owned enterprise.
[And finally Tweek]
Tweek: Ah!
Guy: It's time to stop large corporations. Prop Ten is about children. Vote yes on Prop Ten or else you hate children. You don't hate children, do you? Remember, keep American business small or else.
[Show a pic of all five boys' heads as burnt skulls with hats]
Guy: Paid for by Novell and citizens for a fair and equal way to get Microsoft kicked out of town forever.
They were basically creating products to complement the stuff from Microsoft. But Microsoft expanding their productline and functionality in the direction of whatever Novell made to enhance the platform was inevitable. Novell has actually been a great help to Microsoft, pointing out were their products lacked. And, in a way, steering towards their own demise.
Don't we?
:)
/. all day ;)). The rest of you is making his judgement on the quality of AD on what's written in the press, and especially on sites with doubtable reputations like ZDnet.
The 'MS' camp can't be, so it SHOULD be Novell. As a microsoftie (yeah flame me, I don't care) I laugh about the 'case studies' MS puts up to proof another product is bad/wrong/whatever. Whoever goes for that crap is truely in the wrong profession. Same goes for the other company's marketing departments and their mudthrowing 'Case Studies' about the products of the competition. You fall for those too?
I hope not
For the people who already know what's right and what's wrong: beware what you believe. Think who spread the texts you think is right. Is it the company or is it the techteam working on the product?
About the NDS vs AD debate. NDS is already out there for some time now. It wasn't up to par when it saw it's first light, it seems to be usable very well in lots of environments. So people get used to it, know it's strengths etc. AD on the otherhand isn't even out there. It's not even released. No-ONE has seen it. Only selected testers who got RC3 (and I don't think a lot of them are reading
Novell fights for every percent marketshare they can get. It's their right. For people who have to use products from both companies, MS or Novell, it's better to test out what's there, and judge for ourselves.
And that is only possible AFTER Feb. 17.
Or did you all do excessive tests with AD on a serverfarm full with win2K server machines and numerous clients and also the same test with NDS?
I guess so...
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
I think this just shows you how much the computer industry has changed. In the '80s t was all about who had the better technology. The company who spent more money on R&D would win customers. Now today it seems that companies are worrying more about politics than developing actual companies. MS launching a huge marketing blitz is just an exmaple of how the market changed. If Win2k was so good would MS really need that big of a campaign? They are all ready a well established brand! Linux is trying to put real sofftware developement back into the industry but will it ever revert back? Only time will tell.
"No one can be like me; sometimes even I have trouble being myself."
But it seems to me that Microsoft is practicing FUD against NDS and Novell is giving detail examples of the problems with Active Directory. These are two different things entirely and I auplaud Novell for their restraint.
One of the bigest issues I have with AD is that it only runs on W2K. It isn't even backwards compatible to Windows 98/95 or even Windows 3.1 which a lot of businesses are still using. And the fact that they took a thing like kerberos and perverted it to be proprietary and incompatible with the standard kerberos is beyond belief. "Embrace and Extend" anyone?
Novell works and plays well with others. Novell supplies clients to work with nearly every OS so that you can use their servers or not and NDS is seperate from their servers. You can run NDS on a network without _any_ Novell servers.
All in all I think that Novell is playing very fair against an unscrupulous opponent.
-- Never make a general statement.
Well, it's good to see that EVERYONE on the planet is now berating Win2k. Still, I'm going to upgrade, if only to get the stinking pile of feces called NT 4.0 off of my system. My job on the other hand... We're waiting and seeing (which is really bad, since our university had a contract where we can get it ultra-cheap.) Maybe this FUD will go a little way to getting a *nix server running... Ah well, I can dream.
Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
Yes, it does. Usually it has to be manually enabled - but then there are many, many settings in NT that require registry changes.
Microsoft makes a program called DMACHECK to enable DMA under NT4 - the program has been around since 1996. The MS DMACHECK utility sets NT to use DMA if it detects it. The caveat is that sometimes the NT IDE drivers not detect that DMA mode can be used. The best thing to do is go into the registry and hard code your system for DMA drive access. It is a single registry change that alters how the IDE driver works.
If I remember correctly, DMA support began in SP4. Prior to MS adding support to the OS, Intel offered a bus mastering IDE driver for PIIX chipset motherboards.
It makes a huge difference in benchmarks, but as Microsoft continues to prove to the world: benchmarks rarely tell a true story. More importantly it makes a very significant, very noticeable improvement for real world usage.
You can get the details here:
http://www.arstechnica.com/tweak/nt/udma.html
I have submitted an article about Novell opening the source of some LDAP developement tool. Slashdot never published it. But they publish this article aobut Novell countering MS FUD.
Fine with me, but what Novell stated is truth, not FUD. (there IS a defference)
Sigged!
But it was worth it because its clear to all that NetWare is and always was a best solution for a file server. If I would be forced to change to M$ servers, I would go and find myself another job.
And this blatant lie about Novell NetWare not mirroring disks contrary to W2k and these other lies about their file-server solutions is so terrible that I really don't wonder to Novell to go in counterattack.
And you can see that Novell doesn't need to lie like Microsoft does, only when they will state and comment on their pages what Microsoft admits himself, they will make a set of horror stories about W2k
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
You mean to tell me this is the first time anyone has ever trash-talked M$. The news is that it's Novell, a "heavy" hitter, but this is politics as usual for these guys.
Someone show me a company that doesn't spread FUD about others in its industry - now that's what I call news.
-flux=rad
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
It can be called outright FUD cause they point out even the adresses where Microsofts own papers state the same things. What they do is to point out where the problems are and how AD differs from NDS so that people wont see them as real competitors. All stated about AD is true, they havent been forced to make things up cause the problems are there to point at. Remember that NDS to had some problems in the beginning(but NDS was in fact much more advanced than AD in the beginning to). Also have in mind that Novell probably has more information than most people about AD since they have both clients and NDS for W2000 servers ready. Novell has tried really hard to play fair with microsoft but after the MS FUD about Novells products they probably got real fed up and starts to get back.
Um..... it's a web page.
Ooooo. A web page. BE AFRAID, MICROSOFT.
This is a "campaign"?
If MS's product crashes it, it is truly ms's fault!
I disagree. If MS's product fails to interoperate with BIND, it's MS's fault. BIND dumping core is a problem with bind. Software should NEVER dump core no matter what kind of garbage input you give them. In daemons, dumping core is especially bad. Consider a trivial DOS attack
There is an interesting article in this weeks "PC Week" which talks about the general failure of Novel to capitalize on the lateness of Win2K. The article claims that not only did Novel not gain any marketshare during the delay, but they actually lost marketshare because of Linux.
:)
Buuuuut...the best part of the article states that Novel actually fired "the entire 60-employee marketing staff" Can you say "major image problem?" When I read that I wasn't sure what shocked me the most... that fact that they fired the entire staff...or the fact that they actually had 60 people for marketing... sheesh
When it comes to marketshare it's sad but true that the best technology doesn't mean a thing if you can't crank up a spiffy marketing machine.
-disclaimer- I'm not stating that Novel has the best technology in the above sentence... I'm making a general statement. My knoweledge of networking software leaves much to be desired
It look spretty much like Novell is just stating simple truth, and Microsoft did spread alot of lies and BS about their product, they have the right to defend themselves and point out where Microsoft made mistakes with regards to their product
----------------------------
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
back when the Mindcraft fiasco was going on I emailed the Novell person responsible for the Mindcraft rebuttal site and he seemed genuinely *pissed* off at Microsoft. It's interesting because any other time I've mailed Novell on a topic having to do with something else I didn't get a reply (or at least a real reply).
Another point I'd like to make about Netware is while it is a superior product compared to NT the problem is that there aren't enough people who really know their way around Netware compared to those that do NT. That's going to really hamper Netware. They should do something like Sun and SCO do and sell cheap media kits/licenses. The more people that know Netware, the more likely it is going to be deployed in a commercial setting. I think this would be more sucessful in combatting M$ than just bitching and whining.
A directory service is very similar to NIS+ in the Unix world. It creates a central place for managing all user accounts. Though NDS is so far ahead of where NIS could ever be, specifically with regards to replacting the data, and sharing/exporting it into other formats such as LDAP. Its also important to mention that unlike Active Directory, NDS is *NOT* platform centric, it can operate perfectly fine on a network without any netware boxes. For example I operate a small e-commerce firm we have 3 Sun E250's and about 100 Linux boxes which run on Compaq proliants, we have *no* netware servers. But when I delete a user he disappears from all the systems, when I add a user I get to pick which groups (systems) he has access to. When he changes his password, the password changes on all the systems. Its a nice pretty java interface to manage the whole thing, its a bit slow under Linux but it runs well under CDE. NDS links into the PAM (Password Authentication Module) and really takes the headaches out of syncronizing passwords, etc. Right now we're just bringing up our Intranet webserver so all .htaccess logins are also authenicated against NDS. I hate having 26 different passwords on different systems. Did I mention NDS can also manage how many systems a person can be logged into? I know your wondering what happens if NDS goes down? (to be totally honest I have no clue, since it hasn't happened yet) but its supposed to read the local password file, we removed the root user and gave another "secret" user a root login, just enough access so I could reclaim the box if necessary, but NDS has been extremely reliable for us! I think we might have had more issues if we ran NDS on Netware since I think Netware is a poor excuse for an operating system. We're playing with the idea of running Netware for the marketing people so we can use ZenWorks to manage their workstations, Novell ZenWorks rocks, but it requires Netware. FYI: The linux verion of NDS isn't out yet, but i'm running the beta and it seems fine.
The truth is spoken in a whisper.
:) Or is that precluded by the fact that they speak the truth?
I was a Novell 4.x admin for 4 1/2 years before changing jobs and ending up in an NT assimilated state organization. I have also done a lot of time as a *nix power-user/sysadmin. Personally I'm a Mac/Linux guy.
NT shouts it FUD, and Novell quietly tells those that will listen about it's better product. And Novell continues to improve both the product itself and it's interoperability. 4 or 5 years ago, when the first Novell 4.0 came out, it was good, but I had a few frustrating problems with uptime and data corruption. By 4.01, they had it fixed and it was rock solid. I have more problems with NT 4.0 on a daily basis than I ever did with Novell 4.0's first release.
Coming from the Novell side to NT, I was struck by how much of a joke NT was, a baby Network OS. It didn't have the reliability, it didn't have the granularity to manage users and permissions that Novell did, didn't have the scalability, and there was a bunch of resource wasting GUI right on my server! God damn it, lock the server in a room and manage it from somewhere else. If you're gonna serve stuff (that's what a server is for, right?) put all that GUI somewhere else so the server can concentrate it's resources on what it supposed to be doing. Then maybe you dont have to run a PIII-800 with a Gig of RAM just to serve some files.
If there were employment options here where I choose to live (that being my first priority) that could get me back into a Novell or, even better, a *nix environment, I'd be on the move in a minute. Even leaving the frightening permanence of state service.
Bottom line: in every field there are better products, better ways of doing things, and solutions with great stability that are applicable. But in most cases, it's the liars, the charlatans, the snake oil salesmen - in short, those that shout the loudest - that end up winning. Yes, this is a sad state of affairs and depressing, but we just have to keep plugging away, trying to educate people.
Those of us who are educated, think critically and make good choices as a result will continue to experience the better products and the reduction in stress that comes with the use/management of them. Those who remain uneducated and naive, and listen to 'man behind the curtain' will be forever lost in pits of NT^H^H hell burning and rebooting day by day... unless we can educate them and remove their naivtee'.
It seems that Novell is trying to do this now, they just need to take out a lot more full page ads and plant some employees to post to groups and handle reporters.
In either case, I wish them luck.
Russ
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
The person who wrote
DID YOU KNOW that Windows 2000 may crash non-Microsoft DNS servers? should be larted.
I hate how MS has "embraced & extended" DNS, but
the fact that BIND dumps core when updated by W2K clients is BIND's problem, not Microsoft's!
Another fine study commisioned by Microsoft - "our friends in marketing".
r m/performance/zdlabs.asp It is a performance comparison between 6 identically configured PCs running Win 95, Win 98, NT 4 and Windows 2000 Pro.
9 9/w2krtmpr.asp that states, among other things: "Windows 2000 Professional is the fastest Windows client yet. Independent tests conducted by Ziff-Davis Labs and IT Week show that Windows 2000 Professional is up to 39 percent faster than Windows 95, 30 percent faster than Windows 98, and up to 24 percent faster than Windows NT Workstation 4.0 in configurations with 64 MB of memory or higher." After reading Microsoft's own performance study, I can't figure out how they can honestly state those numbers.
I just read the Microsoft "Windows 2000 Performance Tests" document, by ZD Labs, which is found at http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/guide/platfo
According to Microsoft, NT 2000 Pro is faster than Windows NT 4 - as long as you only have 32M of RAM. If you have more than 32M of RAM, NT 4 takes the lead. With 128 MB of RAM, Windows 2000 was 3 percent slower than Windows NT 4.0. I wish they had done tests with 256M of RAM - if the tests indicate a trend, a 256M RAM NT 2000 workstation could be 5-10% slower than an identical NT 4 system.
What really disgusted me is how Microsoft improperly configured the NT 4 test systems, giving NT 2000 an unfair advantage. According to Microsoft's document describing the tests, the NT 4 platforms were configured with PIO mode IDE drivers, while the NT 2000 platforms were configured with DMA mode drivers. That gives NT 2000 a significant advantage - and it was still slower. In the system configuration documentation, MS specifically states they manually enabled DMA on the Win 95 and Win 98 systems. They do not do it for the NT 4 or NT 2000 platforms. Not surprisingly, NT 2000 auto detected and loaded DMA mode IDE driver support. The NT4 box is installed with service pack 5, so it could be manually configured for DMA support - as they did they did for the Win 9x systems. But then NT 2000 would have been slower.
Also, MS emphasized that the goal of the tests was to show performance in a real world scenario. Which brings up another question: why did they use a single 2G FAT 16 partition on all the systems? Who on earth uses FAT 16 partitions on real world NT deployments?
Microsoft has a marketing document at: http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/press/1999/dec
Um... I don't want this to sound like a flame, but what you are saying is just plain wrong, on almost every point.
;) and a place to store SOME driver and config files, and NOTHING MORE. The Netware OS completely takes over and shuts down DOS so completely that the DOS clock actually stops (if you DOWN and EXIT the server, and do a DATE and TIME from DOS, it will report the time and date the server was started..often years earlier!). The only thing DOS does once Netware is running is, if requested, load a device driver from either the floppy or the DOS partition of the disk (and you will see the performance really hurt when this happens, as it has to jump in and out of the 80x86 Real Mode, and they obviously felt no reason to optimize this). In fact, you can do a REMOVE DOS command which frees up the few hundred K of RAM used by DOS, and slightly improves console security (as you can no longer load anything from the floppy drive).
>It was (until recently) loaded on top of DOS
Netware v3 through v5 (and probably future versions) uses DOS as a BOOT LOADER (a task it is well suited for, in my opinion
OLD versions of Netware (Netware 86 and v2) were free-booting OSs. They were a pain to reconfigure. Using DOS as a boot loader really improved things at the cost of what is now a very insignificant amount of RAM overhead. I can pull a set of non-hardware RAID drives out of most any Novell server and have it BACK UP AND RUNNING on a totally different box (different disk controller, different NIC, different video card, different main board, etc.) in a matter of minutes (barring mechanical problems, like missing cables). I can't think of any other server OS which can make this claim.
>It still only has a DOS-like shell with no decent text processing utilities.
If you consider the Netware environment DOS-like, you have obviously never used many other OSs. The only thing it shares with DOS is a command prompt (i.e., it isn't a GUI). It gives you a command prompt, it has new tasks spawn off their own screens automatically (this is a really cool UI feature I wish Unix and other command prompt desktop OSs had!).
Text processing utilities? Huh? This is a file server OS, not a workstation OS! The LARGEST configuration files I have ever seen on a well-implemented Netware server were less than two pages long. The text editing facilities are limited, but you don't need WordPerfect (or Word 2000) to edit small configuration files. For reference, Netware gave you a full-screen text editor for editing these things when MS was still giving nothing better than edlin. The editor lets you type, correct, and even cut, copy and paste. Not bad for something that is used to edit tiny little files! It even qualifies as fairly intuitive. If you cut your teeth on Word 95 or even MS's EDIT, you may disagree, but EDIT.NLM was implemented long before these products..it can't be faulted for not following their "lead"... It certainly wins prizes compared to vi or emacs for "hit the ground running".
>And until Netware 5, it used an outmoded proprietary network protocol.
Proprietary, yes. Certainly. Stupidly, even (they should have thrown it open long ago instead of militantly demanding licensing fees). Outmoded? Hardly. First of all, IPX is a near zero-maintenance protocol. You provide a unique number for all servers (I use the license number to ensure uniqueness) and for each NICs/protocol set. After that, you just plug in workstations, no IP numbering problems. Hey, every NIC has an address, might as well use it, right? Move a WS? Reboot, and it is back up and running at its new location. Of course, some IS people hate it for just this reason...it doesn't ensure job security as IP does.
The number one reason I like IPX/SPX now, however, is the security. Now that so many offices are connected to the Internet, there are real security issues if you have systems live on the 'net. You have to have and maintain a good, solid firewall at all times. Or...use IPX/SPX for all your private company operations, and use TCP/IP ONLY for getting outside the building! Talk about a perfect firewall: A server which doesn't even recognize the hostile protocols running around the wire. I actually don't care for Netware 5 for just that reason. It scares the heck out of me to think of any server of any kind (probable exception: OpenBSD) holding company data sitting live on the Internet. Again, though..job security for IS people.
>I don't know much about the latest version, but it still looks like something that came out of the ark.
The same would be said of a Unix command prompt by someone who didn't know much about it.
Netware IS a server platform! It is NOT a general purpose OS, and it NEVER was intended to be! Please judge this very capable, very solid platform at the job it was intended and sold to be.
As for adherence to open standards, this is a personal preferance, and one I respect. Ultimately, however, it is results that count. For most businesses, the computer is only a tool to their business, not the goal in and of itself. Netware is the closest thing to "set and forget" networking I have seen, and the fastest repair time OS I have seen. This is very critical to real-world business. Would I run a Web server on Netware? Heck, no. Would I port Doom to Netware? No (although the XWindows interface of Netware 5 would potentially make it a cute stunt). Would I relish the thought of implementing a client-server database engine on Netware? No, although the results would be delicious, the process would be very painful, though NW4x and 5 make it less so. Would I use it as a platform for E-mail or Internet access? No, there are better choices. As a file and print server, however, which is a critical service in most PC-based business now, I haven't found a way to beat it.
Yes, there are few really good people at Netware installation, configuration, and troubleshooting but my experience is there are no more who (really) know NT. NO ONE has more than what, three years of experience with NTv4? I've got five years professional experience with Netware 4, and another six years professional experience with Netware 3, which Netware 4 builds on very directly (and another four years of experience with earlier versions, but NW3+ is so different from NW2- that it doesn't really help much).
I would argue that having an network OS that is "easy" to set up and get running is very counter-productive. You don't want newbies setting up the backbone of your business! Many people consider the loading of an OS the measure or success..these people don't even understand how far they are from success.
O.k...enough with my soap box. I don't mean to attack you or anyone personally. I'm just very tired of people who don't understand the product condemming Netware for totally bogus reasons, and treating this product which the rest of the industry has yet to surpass as a has-been.
Nick.
Here's a link if you are interested in reading some of MS's reponse, especially concerning Active Directory. There are two previous parts linked at the bottom. I not sure if I'll know what to believe after all FUD settles.
--------
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
The Turtle and the Rabbit will duke it out while the penguin waddles ever closer to the proverbial finish line...
/me wonders if we will see this battle move into the T.V. arena...
"Netware hates, children, do you hate children? Vote Windows for 2000!"
"Gates had lots of pr0n in college, do you want pr0n in the hands of children? Vote NetWare in 2000!"
This may be more fun then the 2000 U.S. presidential elections.
NightHawk
I run a Netware 4.11 box at work for file/print/directory, and an NT box for mail/proxy (I know, I know - I'm building Linux boxen to replace it). I know NT much, much better than Netware for one simple reason - the Netware box never needs any attention. It sits in a dark room and hums along, oblivious to the world. I patch it every 9 months or so, but otherwise it's never down. NT, on the other hand, has made me an expert - I can rebuild an NT box in my sleep (because I've had to).
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."