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Novell Releases PostgreSQL for NetWare
An anonymous reader writes "Ever since Oracle announced they wouldn't port 9i to NetWare, Novell has been scrambling to find an enterprise-capable DB. Now it looks like they're settling on PostgreSQL. This follows their decision to ship Apache as the default web server for NetWare 6. Linux aficionados might sneer at an old workhorse like NetWare, but it's got more than 80 million client licenses worldwide, and it ain't going anywhere anytime soon."
Hahah! you must be a young-un'! Novell Netware was THE workgroup network file/print server for the late 80's. The version 3.x of it had a stability and ease of administration that puts most Unix systems to shame (then Novell ruined it in the 4.x versions with unstable add-ons to do interoperation with other platforms)
They had market share because they could do what Microsoft could not at that time - make a server OS.
This may be 'old stuff', becuase the last time I've used novell was years ago in the 3.x and 4.x days... But there is one thing I've never seen since.
Novell has the filesystem with the best undelete I've ever seen. When a file is deleted, it's really just marked 'ready for deletion when necessary' and becomes invisible (sort of hidden), and it's diskspace is marked 'free/unused'.
With a special undelete tool, a user can later undelete any of his files, as long as they haven't been overwritten. And the OS minimizes that. The lower the diskspace utilization, the longer that is. In practice, it's easily more than a couple of days, often weeks.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I don't see why anyone would sneer at Netware. If you've got to administer several Windows machines, Netware is by far the best server for the job.
I don't think I'll hear a single arguement that Windows makes a better server... so what else?
Unix servers for Windows clients don't work very well. For one, MS' native solutions aren't very good, and I haven't seen any client-side programs that can rival the Netware client. It's secure, it integrates nicely, it uses strong encryption (RSA) to encrypt all network traffic, etc.
A Netware server may not be too much like Unix, but it's a hell of a lot better than a Windows Server... and if you've got to have Windows clients, you've got to make some sacrifices.
Netware even has tools to allow Unix compatibility (server-side), so I can't see any reason for an Sys Admin to sneer at Novell.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Well, tough, either port it yourself or you buy Microsoft SQL Server, or you switch to Linux. The world doesn't owe you a free database server, much less one for Windows.
If anything, I think too many open source projects are ported to Windows. That eats up a lot of effort, supports Microsoft, and the users would be better off switching to a free OS in the long run anyway.