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Novell Releasing NDS for Linux
Eric Feldman writes, "Novell will finally be showing its NDS product running natively on Linux. Red Hat is listed as a vendor who will be at the Brainshare conference in March, and Caldera was there last year. The article also talks about some open-source license problems Novell has been having, as well as the possibility of some parts of Groupwise being released under Novell's Open Source License. The next version of Groupwise (code named BulletProof) is supposed to be announced at Brainshare also. It will be XML-based and tightly integrated with the directory."
I have noticed that the phrase, "open some of the code", is becoming common place in press lately. Obviously this is a key to the future of exceptence of the open source model. I would rather have a bit to work with then nothing.
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Offering Open Source Reward's
http://www.OpenReward.com
With the right marketing and some push Novell could lock down the corporate market on this one... For those of you that have not experienced the ease of admin dealing with a well designed NDS tree you are really missing out.
This has got to be good for Linux - NDS could well prove to be a key technology, particularly as by most reports it not only beat MS's offering to market, but also is the better of the two. It also serves Novell well to have NDS on all available platforms - theres little point having a global directory for your organisation if it's specific to only a few systems.
I don't think the license matters - this is a business product aimed at IT departments, who are quiet happy to pay for serious products - but it should help legitimise the use of Linux for other purposes (why can't we use it as a web server, it's already used for NDS...)
Even with a standard commercial licence, this is a tremendous step forward - NDS, for all it is a damned expensive way of administering a network, is still the best way I have seen to date. It is stable, cross-platform (and single-login enabling) and can manage almost anything (from remote resources to application licence counting to bandwidth allocation from NDS enabled routers).
However, the company I work for rejected it for NT administration - purely on the pricing structure; for each registered (not concurrent!) user, per server, you had to pay a large NDS licence fee, with obviously the cost of a standard NT user licence on top of that. I would want to see how the new NLS "per user" model is applied to both the Linux and Nt clients - and how much a Server licence for Linux is under this scheme.....
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-=DaveHowe=-
I have been using NDS for a while now to intagrate my prof's network, it is great. I am glad to see Linux is getting it. This combined with Samba is all we need to move into the fileserving server space right now.
Sweet
Nate Custer
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
How viable is Novell today compared to our Unix options (NIS, NFS, Samba, etc)? Are there any Unix tools for migrating Novell networks to Unix, or to bring them side to side?
What services can Novell provide me that Unix can't?
- EraseMe
Yet another closed app, is this good? Why not donate code to OpenLDAP to make it compatible with NDS?
If nothing else, I doubt that M$oft will be handing out Active Directory for Linux anytime soon - and NDS is both better and cross-platform supported.
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-=DaveHowe=-
S13. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?
The Novell GroupWise IMAP server would be better named GroupFoolish; it is (according to the designer of IMAP) unusably broken. Among other things, it doesn't include a required content length in its BODY[TEXT] response. Fetchmail works around this problem, but we strongly recommend voting with your dollars for a server that isn't brain-dead. If you stick with code as shoddy as GroupWise seems to be, you will probably pay for it with other problems.
Do we need Groupwise on linux ??
RFC1925
#linux: 0
we will have w2k directory one day... which the ms rep said was better than novell's (embed grain salt) but novell and linux? should be interesting.
I suspect that Linux will be a foothold into NDS for commercial-unix - once LinuxNDS proves stable and reliable, it will be ported to HPUX and sun.....
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-=DaveHowe=-
NDS for Solaris has been a product for a while.
:-)
Sun support is old news.
Mike
I agree. My experience has shown that GroupWise is more trouble than its worth.
However, Novell's Internet Messaging Server is comming to linux. NIMS is about the coolest NetWare app I've ever seen.
Have a look at MyRealBox a free webmail/IMAP/POP server ran by Novell using NIMS on NetWare 5. We've been testing it. very slick, and it'll run on Solaris, Linux, and NetWare (load balancing, all platforms at the same time) in the next release or so.
Sweet!
Later,Mike
NDS for Solaris has been a product for a while. :-) :+)
Sun support is old news.
I know - but I doubt it will be the same code as the Linux one - particularly after the OSS community get their hands on it and start writing bugfixes and utils tied to the NDS directory structure. I suspect all of this will be Novell's exclusive property to port to other *nix platforms, pending seeing the actual licence used of course
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-=DaveHowe=-
It was ENTIRELY flatfile-database - so if you could get your client to look at the postoffice, you could connect to and use that postoffice, regardless of platform for either server or client. if you needed to debug, you could manually trace the interchange-flatfiles used for communication between postoffices and/or domains and find the holdups.
Groupwise 5 added document sharing and document storage to the mix, but in MHO breaking the 4.x model and adding tight ties to NDS was one of the worst things ever to happen to the product. Integration modules, yes - but I think that if novell had had a bigger market share, they would have been up on the same stand as Microsoft over that one.......
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-=DaveHowe=-
This product is aimed at large IT departments. While we might want to believe otherwise, there are a lot of people that are still very leery of anything attached to open source, particularly in upper management... ;-). Being GPL'd might actually *hurt* the release, not help. Novell might be better served putting out a commercial version first and then changing over to GPL later...
The number you have dialed is imaginary, please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
isn't there already a Caldera NDS client? I always wondered what that was like; it seemed like a great idea when it was first introduced all those years ago.
with NDS running on Linux, there will probably be a whole new crop of servers that once ran something proprietary but get replaced with Linux. It happened with Web servers, mail servers, and, to a certain extent, SMB-based fileservers, now it will happen to directory servers. Even if NDS on Linux isn't a free source download (and I'm not holding my breath for that), it must still be cheaper than buying Netware.
darren
(darren)
Here are some relevant references from Novell's site:
<darren />
(darren)
I am aware of many customers that would not let Linux in the server room if it wasn't possilbe to manage it centrally with NDS. Why? Do you ever think why are so many MCSEs needed? Because to administer an NT network you need a lot of silly NT admins that will run around silly NT boxes that need to be rebooted or administered.
NetWare does not need that, hence the little number of CNEs around. A typical CNE will lean back on the chair and happily administer a horrendously huge network composed of NetWare, NT and (since recently) Sun boxes. Thanks to NDS. The companies that are used to keep the administrative expenses low (NOT those having a pure NT network, obviously) didn't want to have to deal with Linux because it's a separate box, unattached to the rest of the NDS tree. Now, Linux has a way into those companies, too.
And believe me, those NDS-enabled companies are much more willing to work with Linux than the NT-only companies, for the simple reason that the NT-ony companies have IM departements run by morons.
Sigged!
I moderated it as flamebait because if he really didn't care or know about Linux, he wouldn't post in this forum and this particular thread in the first place.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Where can one find an explanation of how NDS fits into the network ? My administration duties so far have never involved more servers than I could count on both hands, so I'm not exactly clear on what NDS and Active directory provide. Somebody could splain ?
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Coming out of a 1 week fight with a damned Novell 3.2 server re-install.... Novell: GIVE UP! I have never seen such a horrible mess known as a server next to NT. and Novell5.0 is bloatware at it's very best! Now here they are trying to jump on the magical Linux cookie.. Let's grab their steeniking code, make samba emulate a novell server, and migrate all novell boxes to Linux. Hell the migration would take 50% less time than it take for 1 novell install. (Granted 3.2 is very old... but it's what most companies are still using!)
Hey, they wanna write linux software? go ahead. I wont be buying anything with the Novell name on it, and I will be sure to tell everyone I know that Novell is NOT the answer to networking. Linux is though, and over 50% of the internet's servers cant be wrong!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Caldera has had a client for a long time, but it hasn't been NDS aware, IIRC. As a Novell Admin in a mixed network environment I'd be happy with an NDS aware client and a version of nwadmin that runs natively on Linux. I dislike the kludgy solution of having to run VMware (or freemware) to use NWadmin. I've set up a separate windows box, just for NWadmin. I don't even care about being able to manage linux resources in the Directory, I'd be satisfied if I could just run the standard management app natively without having to do a lot of finagling to run either DOS apps or windows apps. This has been a long time coming. I like Novell's stuff. It's fast, reliable, and easy to use (without being limiting). Groupwise is another beast. We are starting to have problems with it. When we installed it, we didn't put into place a policy that would have allowed us to enforce the proper use of an (essentially) e-mail/messaging system. As a result, because there's no way to manage user space usage, we've got people taking up 500+ MB of disk space (in a system of 4-5g users, that adds up to a bunch of gigabytes). I really wish that there was a way to control the amount of space that users have available to them, like you can do with quotas in /[Lin|Un]x/. That would solve a lot of problems for us. Since just about all of our users take advantage of Novell's groupwise client, it's not particularly critical that it be entirely compliant with open standards (at least from the organization's point of view, although I'd be happy if it would). My wish list: Nwadmin, NDS aware client for linux, groupwise quotas (Who cares that it's going to XML, if your servers run out of space)
Maybe we should define a standard for administrative services based on X.500 work. Similar to the good work at IETF on PKIX, profiling services by defining recommended messages and protocols. This helps sort out the complexities of the X.5* work. This would allow for open source development, as well as a clear migration path for vendors toward interoperability. We have a good start with the tools we have like openLDAP.
NDS primarily appeals to the operations side of IT organizations. What's more important is that the product is maintained and supported (by the vendor, or a third party, or just a worldwide group of developers and users). In house development is really unlikely to happen in most cases.
Source code access is really not a plus or a minus to most of these folks. They just want something that works and makes their lives easier and budgets smaller.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Last time I added drives to a 3.2 server, I didn't have to shutdown. Open front, push drive in, DISMOUNT DATA2, LOAD INSTALL, MOUNT DATA2.
This will work out very well for IS managers who have surrepticiously installed Linux/*BSD on the Network. Now they will be able to manage all of them from NDS.
.conf file, allowing the administrator to modify it directly from NDS.
That being said, I openly wonder what level of support NDS for Linux will have for such things as FTPD, or QMail? Will you be able to manage your virtual QMail users from NDS?
One possibility is to create a new object called a 'symbolic link object' which links to the
Just my Monday pre-work ramblings....
Jailbrekr
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
My experience is completely different.
In our environment, Novell is a dinosaur. To its credit, the old install base of Novell servers are performing their jobs admirably. But they're being replaced by NT. And the admins know it. They can't wait to get pulled from the Novell pool and get their MCSE. One admin I talked to was rather bitter about being held in an "unmarketable" position by the company.
Technical merrit need not apply to this conversation. Certification is as much about marketing as technical issues (be it the base technology or the individuals involved). And true to form, Microsoft has positioned themselves (and their certifications) into a much nicer position than Novell.
One final comment...
If the generalizations expressed in this post were slighting Linux, it would have been labled a troll. And to think we feel cheated by other's FUD.
I'd love to see Novell Open Source the thing and let M$ be damned. At a customer's site I recently had to replace a Novell server with an uptime of 840 days with an NT box just because the Corporate MI$ guys wanted all of their sites to standardize on M$oft products. Now I routinely down the server at midnight every 6 weeks. That's better than what I was doing...getting called to come in because the server had froze AGAIN!
I'm not saying that Novell is better than Linux. Save the holy wars for others (presidential candidates?). But this can only help things, IMNSHO.
I am doing the same thing at home with Netware 5, since Cox cable modem service sucks so hard.
In all fairness I could do the same thing with an NT box, just not as easy.
The stability and performance of Netware would be nothing but a gain for Linux. I have seen Netware boxes up and running longer than linux has existed. Simply put there is no more stable OS for the PC Server market than Netware. It's a target that Linux aspires to.
That was funny. Some idiot, who probably has trouble spelling "computer" writes a post that a third grader would be ashamed of, and you say it is funny. Slashdot sucks.
You can ridicule Novell, NDS and Netware all you want, it doesn't change the fact that Linux is not capable of doing what Netware/NDS has been doing for 10 years. The fact that Novell has added Linux to the list of Operating Systems that NDS will support is the best news the Linux community has gotten in the last five years.
I've been using myrealbox for awhile now, and its great. NIMS is a schweeet product to compare to other mail only products (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, web mail). Groupwise is actually a groupware product, like Lotus Notes. Microsoft has no compariable product, since Exchange is mail only. Novell's NIMS product scales to handle more accounts on a single box than Exchange can handle with a five server farm....
I really haven't seen a groupware product for Linux yet, unless Lotus Notes was released and I just missed it.
Also, keep in mind that putting Groupwise on Linux is a positive move for Groupwise and Novell. If it is a positive move for Linux, you can decide on your own, but I can't see how more industrial strength apps for the OS could possibly hurt it. People have cried to Novell for years for a version of Groupwise that runs as an NT service, Ziff-Davis publications seemed to ask for this everytime they did a product comparision. Would you rather that Novell developed for NT or Linux? I knew you would agree with me, that Linun could be a better groupware server than NT, and be more than it currently is...
novell as a file server seemed good. Ive had limited experience but all the 486 novell boxes ive seen as file servers have uptimes 300+days on hardware that if shutdown would never start up. Pretty impressive considering its heavily used every day by an insurance agent. NT cannot do that it takes some damn near impeccable operating system code to do that. We know NT does not have that......I am and always will be amazed at how well the novell machine chugs along with 10 people hitting it all day. *shrugs* Novell will disappear before to long.. Good thing they are providing on platforms that will be around
I'm in two minds about this - Groupwise 4 (a good, usually stable, and easy-to-administer product) was cross-platform with a vengence - it supported most unixes, most intel platform OSs and VMS. It was ENTIRELY flatfile-database - so if you could get your client to look at the postoffice, you could connect to and use that postoffice, regardless of platform for either server or client. if you needed to debug, you could manually trace the interchange-flatfiles used for communication between postoffices and/or domains and find the holdups.
Except the problem with the direct-access mode in GW4 is that it was direct access. Sending a message (task, mail, etc) caused you to do several direct writes from your client to the server involving key database components. When we ran 4.1 it was a nightmare keeping the database uncorrupted -- clients would FUBAR and then the database would go south, requiring a horrificly slow OFCHECK to get it fixed. Ask yourself this: Would you let hundreds of database clients have direct access to your DB, or do it client/server? I vote client server, which is why GW5 is a superior product to GW4.1 (we don't do the document stuff, Novell's db tools are too weak to trust documents to it). I've been crying for years to see all the usual GW NLMs run on Linux. Netware sucks as an applications platform, and GW would rock on Linux.
When we ran 4.1 it was a nightmare keeping the database uncorrupted -- clients would FUBAR and then the database would go south, requiring a horrificly slow OFCHECK to get it fixed.
there was a workaround for that - one of the modes was to set threshhold level for post office forwarding. if you set it to 1, you could make the database read-only for users, and they would dump their messages/updates in the local po-server's in queue for it to process
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-=DaveHowe=-
there was a workaround for that - one of the modes was to set threshhold level for post office forwarding. if you set it to 1, you could make the database read-only for users, and they would dump their messages/updates in the local po-server's in queue for it to process
..OUT directories are still used. We still have a PO go south on us once in a while with a 'broken' message stuck in the queue.
Ugh, the threshold workaround. We had to do this due to (guess what?) a nasty bug with Client32 2.2 and NW 3.11, and it slowed message processing to a real crawl. I seem to remember it working above the PO level, like maybe at the domain level, though. We've banished all those evil revisions to the archive tapes, thankfully.
You can still chase message flow in 5.x C/S (or should I say you still have to chase message flow), the WPCSIN and
The document stuff, though, is for the birds. Novell still refuses to open their 'cryptographic' message store to real DB tools, and I can't imagine the lusers whining about wanting corrupted files restored from tape when they're buried in a GW library. HR occasionally wants so-and-so's email from N months ago, and it requires an entire PO reload (often on the order of 9 GB) and the associated BSing around to get them what they're after. Even worse is when it's some lawsuit where they want [N..N+Y] months worth of conversations from users on seperate POs. I spent a solid week doing reloads for HR once...
At my College we have about 15 fileservers, all running Novell Netware (various version, mostly version four, though). At least once a month, sometimes (although not often) weekly, a server goes down, HARD. Like cycle power/reset button hard.
That means that on average each server is up for about 8 or 9 months. Not bad really, but I'm sure Linux can do just as good a job with a competent Sysadmin running it.
I don't know what one should expect from a server OS in reliability (I haven't studied the topic in depth), but I would say Netware stability is good. But as for it surpassing Linux - that is a tough case to prove (IMHO).
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Not only was the original announcement months ago, they've had the product done for months. In fact, NDS for Solaris was a port of the NDS for Linux code. What's been holding them up has been the entire licensing issue. They want to give it away, but I think they are unsure how to proceed.
Ugh, the threshold workaround. We had to do this due to (guess what?) a nasty bug with Client32 2.2 and NW 3.11, and it slowed message processing to a real crawl. I seem to remember it working above the PO level, like maybe at the domain level, though. We've banished all those evil revisions to the archive tapes, thankfully.
We didn't find it that bad - on a 400-user-max-postoffice system, admittedly. you may have had much bigger POs to deal with - we had a decent working max as each department had it's own PO, and indeed often it's own server - I always suspected it wouldn't scale well, even if the Novell salesdroids were pushing it as the complete enterprise/wan/gan solution...
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-=DaveHowe=-