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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."
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
I am going to reserve judgement on this one until I see both the code and the licence; Novell have a past history of being as restrictive as they think they can get away with where licencing is concerned; The last thing I imagine anyone would want is for Novell to release this under any of the following:
On the other hand, they HAVE started posting to their website the dev tools that used to be one of their more expensive cashcows, so they *may* be gaining Clue due to MS's competition - we will have to wait and see.
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-=DaveHowe=-
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=-
#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.
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 think the main problem here is that Novell's main shrinkwrap product IS NDS - it may be bundled with servers or other software, but when it comes down to it, it is the licences you are paying for (I don't know many organisations that don't have far more netware install cds than they need, but only the licence-key disks they actually use. That's because the CDs are interchangable, and in many cases you are better off using just ONE CD consistantly to avoid revision-changes causing problems during installs to an existing tree). Giving away any more than they have to of their "core" product isn't going to happen. In addition, I am told the majority of their income comes from their training and licencing (CNx programs) and authorised partnerships - paying a substantial fee to gain access to tools and technologies needed to successfully troubleshoot netware installations. If they made too much of their "crown jewels" available, then they would lose much or all of this income.
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-=DaveHowe=-
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.
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.
The only people that I have seen with tremendous amounts of trouble getting Netware up and running, are the people who don't know what they are doing. People who don't want to know.
And guess what, those people have the same problems with NT and Linux. If you are predisposed to failing, you will. What a sad short career that guy must be having. I have seen Netware servers in Janitors closets that were forgotten about, up for several years. No one forgets their NT server because they can't, they have to revisit them far too much.
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=-
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=-