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Novell to Ship MySQL With NetWare 6
An anonymous reader writes "Coming close on the heels of their announcement that they've ported PostgreSQL to NetWare, Novell announced today that they will begin shipping MySQL with NetWare 6. Owing to customer and partner doubts about the GPL, Novell has chosen the commercial version of MySQL, rather than the GPL'ed version."
Reading the license term for MySQL it seems pretty clear that Novell has no choice in choosing the license model. According to the terms at the MySQL page, MySQL is only GPL if the whole system is open sourced or GPL:ed. N'est ce pas?
It might be called 'alpha' or 'beta', but MySQL AB seem to err on the side of caution.
I consider MySQL 4 to be OK for production use.
It appears that they will be shipping MySQL as part of the OS distribution however, PostgreSQL is available as part of a separate Software Developer's Kit.
I were Novell, I'd be more interested in developing a Samba-style SMB server NLM to try to replace NT file and print servers
Netware 6 already has this. I forget their name for it but, it goes under the guise of Any Client or some such. With this feature, Microsoft clients can connect to the Netware 6 servers without the previously required Novell client. The Netware 6 server looks to the client, like a NT server. Netware 6 also supports an NFS like export that allows *nix clients to also connect natively, without the use of Novell client software.
Netware 6 has a lot of really powerful features. What's more, I think that Linuxers would like it because it has a similar feel, even if the commands are different. Hell, it even runs Xwindows with the IceWM.
Novell has been around a long time and will continue to be around a long time regardless of what any Linux/NT/200 people may think.
The company I work for is a pure Novell shop. We run Groupwise for our email, and plenty of other Novell products and we do extremely well. In fact, Novell even powers our web presence. We will be upgrading from Netware 5 to Netware 6 this year.
It IS a real OS. Standalone server sits in my server room and runs all of it's apps very well. It's a hell of a lot more stable than any 2K/NT box and in many ways, just as stable as a Unix box. I won't say better, but I will say it does a good job.
I hate it when people say that Novell is dead and dying. They've been around a long time and they are still around because they always make a decent product and require very little maintenance, unlike the MS OSes out there.
No matter how fast computers get, you'll always be waiting - Matt Klem
As far as a samba server, NetWare 6 also bundles what they call Native File Access Pack. It makes your server appear as a Windows server(CIFS) to windows clients, Mac(AppleTalk) to Mac client or Unix(NFS) to Unix clients. It's also a free download for NetWare 5.
Netware in its current incarnation is a top notch server OS. It's got one of, if not the best LDAP implementations available (NDS, eDirectory) that offers integration with all of its products for very easy administration. (Groupwise is an excellent Exchange replacement, minus the constant virus problems). Once its setup, that's it. It does not require constant attention like other server OSes *cough*. It does still load on top of DOS (for reasons I can't understand) but it is in no way a DOS based OS. In fact, it seems to have borrowed quite a bit from Unix in versions 5 and 6.
What you gain: dead easy file/print administration, extensible LDAP framework built right in, excellent reliablity/stability, can be easily (if you read the documentation) performance tuned
What you lose: application support and expensive licensing.
For small to mid size businesses, you could do better with a WinNT or *nix solution, but for large enterprises with massively distributed networks, Netware is an excellent way to go.
"Watch your cornhole, bud."
Hey by the way, MacOS X 10.2 Server ships with MySQL too !
This is just a me-too tatic by Novell. Many of Novell's previous me-too's have fallen by the wayside as well. One exception at present is Perl.
NetWare ships with Perl 5.00307, an almost useless and stripped down old version (released October 1996 by the Perl folks, and released November 2000 by the NetWare folks) - where you cannot compile your own Modules without a Windows NT machine (95/98 will not be sufficent) Microsoft Visual C 4.2 or later, a CodeWarrior compiler and linker, the "NetWare SDK", "NLM & NetWare Libraries for C" and "NetWare Server Protocol Libraries for C".
To put it as breifly as possible; Perl for NetWare is poorly supported, and does not support basic things such as fork(), chown, syscall, chroot, alarm, and about 20 other functions that are standard with a real, and current Network Operating System (ie: Unix based systems, and to a lesser extent, Win32 systems).
MySQL users on NetWare will very likely fall into the same unsupported trap... History speaks for itself, beware!
Good point - this is a marketing issue. Really, if you guys go to Fry's or Best Buy or whatever and you saw "Rip and mix CD v .98 beta" next to "Rip and mix CD 2.5" which one are you going to buy? Microsofties in da house (and I know there are more than a few, like me, who read /.) remember that MS stirred up some controversy when NT was released in '93 - they have it the version number 3.1 when it was actually 1.0 - the official MS line was that it was in keeping with the nomenclature of Windows 3.1 - of course, we know total B.S. but again, if you are MIS or PHB for a Fortune 1000 and Microsoft wants you to switch to version 1.0 of a new OS, are you gonna feel better if there's an ominous version number of "1.0 build 2192" or nice fuzzy "3.1 build 2192"??
Makes me laugh about this "New AOL 8.0 vs New MSN 8.0" crap - is it a full point upgrade (nope) or is it just Marketing getting freaked out because someone else is shipping something that says 8.0 - life imitates Dilbert more and more every day.
It's been available for a while now (over 1 year) and is known as the NFAP (Native File Access Pack). It is an add-on for Netware 5.1 and native in Netware 6. Full support for almost all clients including Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux with full grandular File access rights.
http://www.novell.com/products/nfa/
Novell Connection magazine is really an excellant rag. http://www.nwconnection.com/
It's short, which means you can find time to read the whole thing each month.
It has informative articles about Novell products, not lame marketing-written crap. It's worth keeping up on what Novell is doing because most of their products are truly kick-ass.
You can probably qualify for a free subscription.
The killer feature is the monthly column on packet filtering and traffic shaping. Awesome. Probably the best regular column out of the dozen or so IT/Networking mags I get each month.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Information has to be held somewhere; why not a database? The common misconception is that Btrieve and MySQL (or other relational databases) are equivalents. They are not. Btrieve is closer in concept to BerkeleyDB and variants.
Apples and oranges. And the network data has to be stored somewhere.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.