Linux Growth Doesn't Offset NetWare Decline

steveit_is writes to tell us CommentWire is reporting that the decline in NetWare and Open Enterprise sales is plummeting at a much faster rate than their SUSE Linux sales are growing. It seems that the transition is proving to be every bit as difficult as Novell execs originally suspected. From the article: "When Novell last week announced its financial results for the fiscal first quarter ended January 31, the said that growth in its SUSE Linux and related products was decent, but that sales of its NetWare and Open Enterprise Server--a variant of NetWare that uses Linux as the operating system kernel that was announced last year--declined by 11%."

Comments

Netcraft

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft confirms Novell is dying. It's been slowly dying for years, and I don't think there's anything to save it. Dunno what will happen of suse afterwards.

Re:Netcraft

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a crying shame that in it's desperate attempts to stay financial, Novell have been allowed to latch onto SuSe linux and drag it down with it. What was a leading Linux distro with solid features and development has been butchered to graft 'netware' into it, leaving a once mighty disto hobbled and doomed to a slow and painful death.

Why make the comparison

[Penguinoflight]

Someone has to state the obvious. Past users of Novell aren't going to just switch directly to another Novell product that is completely unlike the other one. Whatever growth of SuSE will be because of the sucess of SuSE to provide a good linux distribution, and not because of Novell's name. We saw this before with Corel; They made a unique linux distribution, and some liked it. Nobody decided to move their department to Corel Linux just because they had been using WP.

Re:Why make the comparison

[unladen swallow]

I have to agree.

I got started with networks with Novell Netware 2.12.

From there I moved to 3.12, 4.11.

3.12 was rock solid, the only problem was that it was not an application server, it only did file and print (and did it very well). Having PC's/Solaris/MAC/OS2/Mainframes able to access the same files/print jobs was huge.

During the 2.12 and 3.12 days Microsoft (Win 3.11) was making major inroads with applications which IMO killed Novell. Since Novell did not have a App server to counter it (no one was supporting apps at least on Novell). Novell was left with file and print jobs.

Installing shared apps on a Novell server could be a major nightmare.

When NDS came out it was too little too late.

I see no real reason to migrate to SUSE/Novell at this time

I have bought the 9.2/9.3 version of SUSE (need to buy 10) just to help support Novell.

Re:Why make the comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

That 'not an app server' line is basically a naive twit in 1995 comment.

NetWare can be, and is, used for pretty much anything that your average company needs on a general purpose server, from F+P, to email server (alot better than Exchange I should add) to DBs from MySQL ot Postgrest, Sybase and Oracle. For years, in those old days, NetWare was the best non high end solution. When NDS came along, it was not 'too little, too late' but rather it was ahead of its time (like Vines) but made decent inroads anyway. Not the companies that adpted it have been reaping the benefits and continue to do so. Your big outfits aren't moving.

Re:Why make the comparison

[laptop006]

*NDS* is too little to late.

THE BEST directory server out there is too little?

Re:Why make the comparison

[T-Ranger]

Novell did have an app server, it was called "Netware". Oracle ran on Netware. Pegasus mail did too. It was a lack of third party support, not a lack of a valid platform.

NDS, if anything, was too much too early.

While I can see advantages to directory services for a 1 person network, DS is very much influenced by the "network effect". The more you use it, the more valuable it is. The more objects it has, the more usefull it is. Its most usefull for large networks. WfW and later NT workstation and 95, with their built in p2p networking, was, in many cases "good enough". Even for networks that used, and liked, NW 3.11, but translated to "good enough" WfW/95, when they grew, grew into other MS products. Netware 4.x, with NDS, was a race to the top, with the bottom falling out compleatly.

Re:Why make the comparison

[Shads]

Actually they are, I helped migrate the largest novell installation in the world to ads and microsoft.

The US Postal Service for reference.

Re:Why make the comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

yes it is too little too late, no point in being the best when everyone that has the market share is good enough.

Re:Why make the comparison

[OnlineAlias]

Funny, I helped to *install* NetWare there in the early 90's and did a ton of the conversions to NDS. You have undone my work!

Re:Why make the comparison

[bonius_rex]

Apparently, "too late" means eight years before the competition....

• NDS(eDirectory) released 1993
• Active Directory (released with Windows 2000 in 2001

More on topic, I admin a server farm of about 40 Netware 6.5 servers. Unless Novell stops supporting Netware, I really don't expect to migrate to Suse. What I would like to be able to do is migrate some of the Windows app servers to Suse (or Netware, whatever). Unfortunately, the apps are only supported on Windows, so that's what we have to run.

Novell isn't making things any easier on themselves. I want to install Novell's patch management and asset management products, and they BOTH RREQUIRE Windows servers!

Argh!

Re:Why make the comparison

[filesiteguy]

By the way, 10.1 is coming out in a month (if they're according to schedule) so just hold off. :)

(I've bought 9.2 and 10.0 retail.)

Re:Why make the comparison

[itwerx]

The US Postal Service for reference.
Dammit, no wonder our mail's been so slow!


(Ba-bump-pshh! Thanks folks, I'll be here all week!)

Re:Why make the comparison

[timjdot]

Good. Maybe you guys can tell me why 9.2 seems to only work on my notebook?

After a long install on a PC it seemed to be working. Hit the net and got some sound. Shut down to attach a CD cable and that was it. Now it boots to the console and tells me to

"umount -n -r readwrite,rw /" or something like that.

I login root and do it and ^D. Restart. Same. Try with safe boot menu option. Safe boot does an fsck and chkdsk or something. The same problem. Try a few more variations.
Pls don't tell me I have to reinstall again. Next time I'm just going back to Win2k.
I really like SUSE so far on my laptop. Very attractive too.

Thanks!
TimJowers

Re:Why make the comparison

[filesiteguy]

Well, I'm still a newbie. I've only been using it for about two years, so I can't help much with the details. However, you should be able to get support without an issue. There are a number of resources at your disposal.

Ask the same question at linuxquestions.org or on suseforums.net or on one of the mailing lists: http://en.opensuse.org/Communicate#Mailing_Lists

Also, I would highly recommend against using 9.2 these days. 10.0 has been out for awhile and is worlds better than 9.x in terms of speed, usage, drivers and app selection. (In fact, I'm suprised you have 9.2 running on a laptop. I'd heard there were numerous issues and didn't even try until 9.3 to get it running on mine.)

You can get 10.0 for free here: http://en.opensuse.org/Released_Version

HTH!!

Re:Why make the comparison

[briantf]

Hmmmm, NDS on NW4 came out in *late* 1992, they had a deal where you bought NW3.11 and then you'd get NW4 for free. It didn't work at ALL, not in any meaningful way. Amazingly terrible. NW4.01 came out in late 93, it worked to a degree. Unfortunately, it had a limit of 2700 objects per container, which really screwed 3Com (they were migrating off their own NOS to NW4). NW4.02 came out in early 94 and it worked OK, since it was the accumulated patches needed to make the 3Com migration work. Unfortunately, it was still a LOT of work to migrate a NW3 shop to NDS.

NW4.1 came out in late 94 and finally separated the NDS database out of the kernel so you could upgrade one without upgrading the other. Unfortunately, it ATE a whole lot of 4.02 installs when it upgraded them. They patched their way around this with a different DSREPAIR, but basically Novell screwed any of their early adopters multiple times.

This meant that NT had plenty of time to get the kinks sorted out. Keep in mind that NT351 had a darn good NetWare migration utility (called VISINE because it got the red out) for NetWare 3.x shops. It also introduced File & Print Services for NetWare which was an emulator so NetWare client machines (DOS clients & Windows) could logon to NT *unchanged*. Microsoft took advantage of Novell's missteps, but Novell flat blew it.

I met a lot of interesting NetWare admins at a class M$ put on in sF back in late 94, we had a lot of fun with the presenter because he was far more conversant in NT than NetWare, but everyone came away wondering if Novell was going to make it. Very sad to see them go like this.

Regards,
Brian in CA

Re:Why make the comparison

[Shads]

If it's any consolation, I felt bad breaking a working system by making it a non-working system.

What were you expecting?

[penguin-collective]

That story is phrased so that it might suggest like Linux isn't being a big success for Novell, but that's bullshit. Novell had a cash cow with a proprietary enterprise product. That's history. It's history because the market has changed. There is no reason at all to expect that they will ever do as well with any other product.

The fact that they have been able to turn Linux into a business for them at all is a good thing.

Re:What were you expecting?

[PCM2]

The fact that they have been able to turn Linux into a business for them at all is a good thing.

And where's the evidence of that? You're being a little premature, don't you think? No offense to Novell, but last I heard they bought somebody else's Linux business. Since acquiring Suse, they've seen its share of the Linux market shrink compared to Red Hat's. Meanwhile, their transitional product for past (and future) Netware customers, Open Enterprise Server, is critical to their success and yet is included in that 11 percent decline in sales.

Novell has an existing customer base and a whole boatload of cash. Both are depletable resources.

Re:What were you expecting?

[molarmass192]

Since acquiring Suse, they've seen its share of the Linux market shrink compared to Red Hat's.

You have data to back that up? Everything I've seen in the mid to large corp field defies that, with a few SuSE rollouts I know of, at least in Europe and North America, and no new RH rollouts. The reason seems to be that the Novell brand is an easier sale for IT project managers, it's always Novell SuSE, never SuSE alone, and possibly cheaper support contracts? Don't get me wrong, RH still has more boxes out there, but I'm not getting wind of new RH deployments versus SuSE.

Re:What were you expecting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Novell are dumb they had a good business model with the reseller model for netware - all those small, local IT shops pushing the product spring to mind.

They really need to

1. get their ass in gear and apply this model to suse.
2. create of the shelf solutions for common small to medium business configs

Re:What were you expecting?

[PCM2]

It's been reported numerous places, including CNet News.com. I'll take an industry analyst's estimates over your anecdotes.

Don't kill the cow 'til the calf is grown

[swalker42]

Novell has declared it's cash cow dead (Netware) long before the new cash cow (Linux) has replaced it. Now Novell has never explicitly said Netware is dead, just that the direction it will be taking is Linux. That's a lesson it learned from WordPerfect. Announce the end of the only product making money long before the new product has replaced the revenue. Ah well, at least Novell was able to use something from one of the many companies it bought. Too bad it was rotten business sense.

Re:Don't kill the cow 'til the calf is grown

[Urusai]

I thought NetWare was dead sometime in the mid 90s when it was replaced by either NetBEUI, ArcNet, or sneakernet, I can't remember.

Re:Don't kill the cow 'til the calf is grown

[bobcat7677]

Yes, Netware had lost some of it's hold earlier in the '90s with the newer tecnologies and the lack of seemless integration with the windows desktops everybody was starting to run. But Netware really died Dec 31st, 1999. There was a (minor) Y2K bug in the version everybody was running (4.x I think was the culprit if memory serves). The only "solution" was to upgrade to 5.x. Of course Novell was greedy and told companies they had to pay (alot) for that upgrade and THAT was when everyone went scrambing to Microsoft and others. I actually did Novell networking support up till that date. By that date; every company, school, and even government client I worked with had either switched or was in the process of switching. I haven't logged even 1 hour of Novell support since 2000.

Just recently I worked with a new client (on a database project) who are still running it. They are having problems with the newer versions and have spent a fortune on it, but are locked into some custom software that will cost them a another fortune to re-build once they are finally forced to switch. The good news (for me) is that my company is now positioned to get at least some of the contracts for doing that work when the time comes *GRIN*

I find it interesting that Oracle followed a similar path of charging way too much for licensing and upgrades and are in the process of experiencing a similar fate.

Re:Don't kill the cow 'til the calf is grown

[shippo]

It wasn't just Netware that died then, Banyan VINES (remember that) also suffered a similar fate, although that was due to Y2K issues with their Windows E-mail client.

I worked for a Banyan reseller back then. Most of our customer's had policies whereby everything needed to be compliant and in place by mid-1999, or even earlier. Banyan had got their OS up to date fairly quickly as they only had one point in the entire server OS that handled two digit years. However they also had a Windows E-mail client called Beyond Mail which was very problematic. As well as the conversion to 32-bit Windows resulting in a really buggy mess, the date for the release of a Y2K compliant version kept slipping further and further into 1999. Many of our customers just cut their losses, dumped the E-mail system and migrated to NT.

There was also another Banyan bug that raised it's head around the same time. Implementation of long filenames for Windows 95 and so on finally appeared, but it was implemented badly. Although it worked fine in the US which used one codepage, European support with other codepages was severely broken, and lead to damaged filesystems and data loss. As a European reseller we were stuck, and lost a couple of major sites over this.

Re:Don't kill the cow 'til the calf is grown

[SimonH_1978]

I've been running a NetWare 4.11 server for years. It's solid as a rock, and doesn't have any Y2K issues as far as I'm aware. I can't remember when I last had some downtime with it.

Re:Don't kill the cow 'til the calf is grown

[a9db0]

The culprit was 3.12, not 4.x. And it was truly minor - Pre-2000, account expirations happened at the beginning of the date of the expiration. Post 2000, they happened at the end of the day.

I'm confident in this as I did the Y2K testing of NetWare 3.12 and 4.x for a major entertainment conglomerate. We then used NetWare in the lab as we tested all of the other applications on the network. Other than the above mentioned, we had no issues.

My 4.12 serer is still running fine, thank you very much.

The real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest issue facing Novell right now is that existing NetWare customers find Linux a real step backwards - particularly in the area of Directory Servies. Open Enterprise server is currently a half-baked attempt to address these issues. Right now the existing NetWare base have been told they have to move so most of them are moving to Windows and Active Directory.

Re:The real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

*Troll snagged* I am an OES admin in a 1500+ user environment, and I can tell you that eDirectory on OES Linux is anything but half-baked. It is very, very feature rich and secure. We are having some great successes with the product. Myself (Linux admin background) and my partner in crime (Netware admin background) are very happy with the very low admin overhead we have in a pretty complex environment. Our favorite part about OES is all the services that come bundled with the OS that is included in our MLA. Half the time when we come up with a great idea or our users request some kind of feature we are finding that we already own the software that can make it happen. We are rolling out iFolder 3 and eGuide currently and they are working great. We have moved one of our Groupwise Post Offices to OES Linux and it is running rock solid. I will put my Netware/OES shop up against any M$ or Redhat shop any day of the week as far as labor costs and software costs and downtime. It kills me when I read comments like "Half-Baked" blah blah...But unfortunately as we all know, the better technology does not always win. I have told my PHB that when they are ready to pull the trigger on AD I will be happy to go get my MCSE...hey for me, M$ means double or triple our staff and job security...

Re:The real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The Directory itself may be fine but the integration in OES is halfbaked compared to NetWare. Example, Linux User Management - when do you need it, when do you not? Notice that there is no corresponding complexity in NetWare - everything just works out of the box. Example 2 - root password is different on every box. Again on NetWare there is no concept of a box having its own administrator outside of the Directory. The post above is not claiming that these things are wrong, just that to an existing NetWare user they look like a significant step backwards and that Windows looks like a more attractive option.

Don't get me wrong - I would like to see Novell succeed but right now the reality is that previously loyal customers are leaving because Novell have forced them to chose between something they have some familiarity with (Windows) and something that one day might give them the same seamless admin experience as NetWare (OES).

Re:The real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I see no point in you saying that Linux is a real step backwards-in the area of dirctory services. eDirectory works on more platforms than just Netware, you know. Of course you have to buy it, but you have to buy every solid enterprise directory product. You should check out the Novell website or ask their partners/current customers about OES before you make educated guesses. It's still better than SLES9...

Re:The real problem

[cerberusss]

I have told my PHB that when they are ready to pull the trigger on AD I will be happy to go get my MCSE...hey for me, M$ means double or triple our staff and job security...

If you're in it for the money, you can probably better move elsewhere and get some Linux certification (maybe from Novell).

Re:The real problem

[somersault]

there is a difference between wanting to keep your current job, and wanting to earn more money, in which case you'd probably go to another job.

Re:The real problem

[Total_Wimp]

Example 2 - root password is different on every box. Again on NetWare there is no concept of a box having its own administrator outside of the Directory... ...they look like a significant step backwards and that Windows looks like a more attractive option.

FYI, in the Windows world all servers except domain contollers have a sperate "root" account on each server. You can use your domain credentials for all member servers, but you still must maintain a seperat Administrator account on each server.

This is not necessarily a bad thing either. It has it's uses.

TW

Re:The real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that but this is not the case currently on NetWare. You're missing the point. In order for Novell to maintain customers, OES Linux needs to be a drop in replacement for *NetWare* and right now it is not.

Even if it is better than Windows (which it is, IMHO), OES Linux is simply too much hassle for people. Novell are forcing people to change to something more awkward - OES Linux. A significant proportion of the customer base are moving to Windows instead because they already have some familiarity with it.

In a lot of shops, management have wanted to move to Windows and Novell loyalists have fought to keep NetWare there. Is it any surprise that they don't want to fight that battle for something they know little about?

Novell History, for those that forgot.

[WindBourne]

They were originally a mainframe company in the 70's. in fact, they were good size being tied to the IBM mainframe. Afterall, back then nobody got fired for picking IBM mainframes. But by mid-late 80's, they were drying up. IBM was killing off its prodigal children that made it money. Basically, IBM would either buy the companies or would put it out of business in many illegal fashions. But Novell did not move. So they brought in a CEO to take them into the ground and get what they could out of it. And that would be Ray Norda.

Of course, Ray found that a small group was working on some interesting items and focused the company on it. Of course, they did lay off a large number of their staff. IIRC, they got down to something like 100 employees. But they came back in flying colors.

Novell will go through some leans times, but they learned to jump ship BEFORE it sank completely. It would have been better had they jumped earlier, but ....

Novell will be around in 10 years. I doubt that companies like symantic, nortin, intuit, and AOL will.

Re:Novell History, for those that forgot.

[d.corri]

Novell will be around in 10 years. I doubt that companies like symantic, nortin, intuit, and AOL will. Yeah, people will eventually stop buying Symantic's Nortin AntaVirus.

Re:Novell History, for those that forgot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong.

Novell was not involved in mainframes.

It started out at the dawn of the 80s making microcomputer trinkets, and eventually became successful selling Netware - which it survives on to this day.

Re:Novell History, for those that forgot.

[MrNougat]

I hear that Novell was pushing really hard for IPX/SPX to be the protocol for the internet, which was silly and impossible because it's a broadcast protocol. Then they put off implementing TCP/IP for a million years, while the internet (and networks connected to it) were taking off on TCP/IP.

I also hear that Novell put a lot of work into Directory Access Protocol (DAP) for network management databases. DAP grew and grew and was too bulky to be popularly used. Somebody made up Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which is now used by Microsoft for Active Directory.

Now I'm hearing that Novell is going toward Linux. Based on past history, that does not bode well for Linux.

Re:Novell History, for those that forgot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Clueless. Simply Clueless.

Novell had TCP/IP as it's default core protocol well before MS, and supported it as a free option from about 94. No downloading shity Trumpet Winsock. As for LDAP support, I can't even see the relevance. Novells directory supported it as soon as I went looking for it. Certinaly, I got my LDAP workng when my sister companies NT admins were trying to work out what they needed to install (and what a directory was) arond 97.

Re:Novell History, for those that forgot.

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped last Friday. I bought 710 seats of McAfee as a result of an abusive Symantec Australia sales person threatening me over renewal deadlines. (seriously..and, oh, and I bought their AntiSpyware and an i1400 IDS too for any Symantec Manager reading. Thats 55k for a staff member that needs to know when to back off.)

Re:Novell History, for those that forgot.

[jkuespert]

"I doubt that companies like symantic, nortin, intuit, and AOL will"
That is one of the most uncorroborated comments I have read to date. From where does this prediction come?

Re:Novell History, for those that forgot.

[OnlineAlias]

Novell didn't support IP as a core protocol until 5.x and at that time they retrofitted 4.x with it and made it into 4.12. This would have been in what, 1998 or so? Up until that time, you could not speak to a Netware server directly with IP at all.

Re:Novell History, for those that forgot.

[itwerx]

Yeah, people will eventually stop buying Symantic's Nortin AntaVirus.

We did a couple years ago due to stability & compatibility issues and the fact that they were starting to miss things! Unfortunately with Microsoft coming out with their own AV product Norton is square in their sights so it's only going to get worse. For a product as tightly integrated with the MS API as Norton is, that's the kiss of death.

      (Thank goodness for AVG and Trend Micro! :)

Stupid GNOME / Ximian crap

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO they put too much stock in Ximian, which is doing almost nothing interesting. Can't even make a decent file selector after all this time. Not enough emphasis on making Linux work well for business. Everyone on the old platform is going to need to switch to something new at SOME point; they should be doing a lot of development in anticipation of the switchover.

Re:Stupid GNOME / Ximian crap

[vhogemann]

You're wrong.

Novell got Evolution, the email and calendaring app, along with the other Ximian technologies. Now Evolution is compatible with Exchange servers, and almost as goog as Outlook... and there is a Win32 port on the go.

Exchange and Outlook are key components for Microsoft, there are lots of places were they're the only reason to keep Windows Servers. If Novell offer an equal, or better replacement, it will be a cash cow almost as goog as Netware was.

IMHO thats an important piece of software that OpenSource lacks... a complete, integrated Email-Calendaring server and clients... And I have tested most of them, including Kolab, OpenXChange, Horde, etc, etc... none is an Exchange killer.

Re:Stupid GNOME / Ximian crap

[AELinuxGuy]

It is not Open Source, but is relevant to Novell - check out Groupwise. It really gives Exchange a run for it's money.

Netware, support hell

[Anonymous Coward]

the decline in NetWare and Open Enterprise sales is plummeting at a much faster rate than their SUSE Linux sales are growing. It seems that the transition is proving to be every bit as difficult as Novell execs originally suspected.

At $DAYJOB, We've had all kinds of trouble since 5.1. The problems are so signifigant that we've gladly paid Novell to send an engineer to look over the problem at $2,000 per day. To date, the suggestions have been... less than hoped for.

The main problem seems to be memory management in versions after 5.1. The problems are so bad that we are actively looking at moving to Microsoft AD, because it's obvious that Novell can no longer support +15,000 users and +30,000 workstations. Indeed, anything over 100,000 objects in a single container are trouble.

Gee, I used to manage four times that with Kerbros, YP, and rsync. For free. With no trouble. But, hey, Unix is "old technology" and needs to be replaced. So says Management, anyway. I still haven't seen the convergent force field heating systems, so I guess I have to heat my dinner the old fashioned way: wood, coal, charcoal, stove or microwave. Fate forfend that I have to use dung chips. They leave such an after taste.

Re:Netware, support hell

[Bradac_55]

That's what happens when you do not have the foresight or skill to upgrade from
an older version of Netware. I've run large scale Netware 5.5 and 6.0 operations
with 30k+ workstations without needing help from Novel or having "memory
management" issues.

NetAdmin has always made MS AD look like the short bus stepson of the networking
industry. I just can't take anyone serious that says they are looking at MS
products after taking the time to work with and *learn* any of the Unix platforms.

I am actively moving to the Suse platform but it's not because Netware sucks, it's
because it will no longer be supported.

Re:Netware, support hell

[Lehk228]

just tell management that a particular flavor of unix (the one you are using now) is the future and is based on the foundations of the old unix.... while not actually changing anything.

oh yea and if they mention switching to windows stab them in the throat with a rusty spoon

Re:Netware, support hell

[Yaruar]

5.1 was probably where novell peaked for me. 4.x was pretty good, and 3.x was so stable that apart from NDS most file servers didn't need an upgrade, but for me 5.1 was where it was at. When it came to file/print servers in any small to huge multi site setups 5.1 was stable, damn easy to administer and it just worked (apart from the initial implimentation of the java based management console, but the less said about that beast the better)

IMO the thing that killed Novell was a combination of two things. Firstly Microsoft stole the march with AD, which was and is still a poor mans implimentation of NDS. And secondly most companies had no logical upgrade path. When you were running a 10,000 user company happily on 4.x or 5.1 with virtually no downtime there was no real need to upgrade. From what i saw 6 added virtually no obvious benefit to the average company which wanted file/print services. There was no inbuild obselecence to the systems and no 2 year enforced upgrade to a syatem that worked better ALA microsoft. I suspect that Netware still has a significent marketshare out there, but people aren't buying the new version every year because they don't have to, therefore novell don't get revenues.

Re:Netware, support hell

[dwandy]

There was no inbuild obselecence to the systems and no 2 year enforced upgrade

This is one of the sadest commentaries on what makes a succesful software company I have seen in a long time...

Re:Netware, support hell

[OnlineAlias]

Respectfully, you haven't run into those issues because you got lucky. There was/is a huge fight within Novell about memory management in the core OS. Back in the day, we had $50k Compaq 7000's that exihibited exactly the parent's problem running 5.1. Reference "the judge" in novell's knowledge base for more information.

From Novell's knowledgebase:

THEJUDGE.NLM is not to be used for every high utilization problem...

If the above recommendations do not work....

Applying the latest support pack has also been known to fix these issues...

If those kind of statements don't indicate a major unresolved issue, I don't know what kind would.

Re:Netware, support hell

[certain death]

Anyone who would put 100,000 objects in a single container needs to re-think their tree design. Do you have any CNE's on staff? Have you looked into 6.5? We run over 300 Novell servers, and have minimal problems.

Re:Netware, support hell

[hendersj]

That depends on what you are intending to do with the directory. I have seen many companies who have well over 100,000 objects per container when they were designing (a) an external-facing directory, or (b) a very large identity vault for use with Novell Identity Manager. I probably wouldn't design a tree with this many objects in a single container that was partitioned to replicate over any type of WAN, but if all replicas are on the same high-speed backbone, this type of design isn't a problem.

eDirectory 8.7 can handle this type of scalability without breaking a sweat - as long as the hardware and network are (a) up to the task, and (b) configured correctly.

Novell Lost In The New Open Source World

[Anonymous Coward]

The worthless effort Novell was putting in to dead projects like Mono was the final nail in the coffin. Novell clearly has no idea what their place in the new and booming open source market is.

Why choose SuSE?

[drgonzo59]

It is not that they have to compete with major OS systems, but there are also a bunch of competing Linux distributions, some of which are completely free and will even offer many goodies for the enterprise customers (the new Ubuntu Dapper for ex.). It is really hard for a linux distribution to stand out. They better have stellar customer support and hope to land some huge contracts with that. They can and will milk the name "Novel" that many recognize from the early 90's but that will only take them so far...

I have tried SuSE, it was nice, polished interface but it just didn't stand out. Now I am addicted to Ubuntu, it is simple, it does what I want and nothing more, kind of like crack cocaine...

Re:Why choose SuSE?

[Bill Hayden]

... there are also a bunch of competing Linux distributions, some of which are completely free and will even offer many goodies for the enterprise customers (the new Ubuntu Dapper for ex.).

Sorry, but it is wishful thinking to say that even the most forward-thinking enterprise customers will have Ubuntu on their radar. You can't get the time of day in the enterprise without a well-known name and the ability to offer a support contract. Sorry to say, but Redhat and maybe SUSE are the only ones with a foot in the door.

Re:Why choose SuSE?

[drgonzo59]

Depends what enterprise... If Ubuntu is easy to use, and there will be ways to distribute updates automatically, there will be way to remotely administer machines and other goodies, so I don't see why a company "thinking about" linux/open source won't agree to give it a try. Two years ago nobody has heard of Ubuntu and today it is one of the most popular Linux distributions worldwide. Who knows what might happen in another 2-3 years... I have used all 3: Redhat, SuSE and Ubuntu and I find that Ubuntu works best for me at home (scientific computing, some database manipulation + other regualar stuff like browsing and email stuff).

Re:Why choose SuSE?

[tulare]

I'd bite, but only if kubuntu were as polished as ubuntu. Sadly (I just tried this last week), it isn't.

"Just use KDE." --Some famous geek-person.

Re:Why choose SuSE?

[mwvdlee]

The "Support" enterprises buy is largely the ability to blame somebody outside the enterprise.
Ubuntu may be good and easy to maintain, but who can you blame if it blows up in your face.
No manager will want to take that responsiblity.

Re:Why choose SuSE?

[anandrajan]

We ended up choosing SUSE all across the board because we wanted a good, stable, KDE desktop, Our evolution was redhat (until version 9) -> Mandrake (until version 9.2) -> SUSE (from 9.1 onward). Mandrake seemed very buggy (in the 9.2 days) which is why we moved to SUSE.

Re:Why choose SuSE?

[MrWiggum]

I work for Novell Support and let me tell you nothing could be more true. We are the red headed step children of I.T. departments everywhere.

Re:Why choose SuSE?

[drgonzo59]

Blame the sysadmin, fire the IT team if they screw up, I think that will make them more responsible and make them work harder.

Re:Why choose SuSE?

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

In the commercial world, Linux distributions stand out by having applications (that businesses need to run) saying "will run on distribution X". Application vendors pick distributions with the largest market share (among their target market). Right now, these are versions of Redhat and Suse - so that's they say their products work on.

Re:Linux = failure

[nicolas.kassis]

I think he was trying to be sarcastic. Nic

SuSE and Novell

[Vskye]

I've ran SuSE in the past, from the 5.x series and lately 9.3 prior to going with Kubuntu. (I'm a old debian user) The things that impressed me in SuSE is the fact that Yast was soooo much better in 9.3, on the other hand I was turned off by the DRM crap, which getting around it was easy enough, but still a PITA. Novell's web site is also a nightmare, still about as friendly as in the early 90's. (hint here Novell, fix it!)

I also never see advertising for *anything* Novell anymore. Humm.

Re:SuSE and Novell

[God of Lemmings]

I concur, I haven't seen any form of advertising coming out of Novell in years....
Come on Novell! Learn how to advertise, You can't afford not to.

Re:SuSE and Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

YaST is precisely one of the reasons SuSE has not been more commercial. As pretty as it is, it's really an undocumented collection of insonsistently written interfaces under the hood, and it breaks things very badly. For example, its chroot handling for BIND and DHCP is a bad joke: you do not intermingle the contents of a chroot tree with the directory it's copying the files from, and you do not make the system files symlinks *out* of a chroot tree. You move the files and make the symlinks *into* the tree. The autoyast tool can't look at update locations and base repositories at the same time, so solving dependencies for new features can accidentally revert core packages and break your system.

The insistence on re-arraning configuration files in ways that software authors never dreamed of makes the systems unstable if you try to upgrade to a new version of the software, such as the insistence of filling the kernel SRPM's with tarballs of bundled patches instead and managing those with a shell script run by the .SPEC file, instead of actually putting them in the .SPEC file and as separate patches like any sane system. Their factoring of their packages is very bad, and the cutesy little tricks they play with their SRPM's making them rely on packages that are not part of the distribution but exist only in their build environment make development quite hard. Coupled with the fact that autoyast demands a user at the console to do updates, and you get the sorts of reasons I got a 500 machine site to throw it the heck out and switch directly to CentOS.

And don't get me started on the NVidia driver craziness: do *not* weld shell-script installed packages into an RPM manager, because they're distinct beasts and will step on each other.

YaST is where Linuxconf from RedHat was 4 years ago: you many notice that RedHat dumped it and now makes smaller, more modular, and consistently good configuration tools that are much smaller and easier to modify for new features. If you need to admin a SuSE box, install http://www.webmin.com/ and http://fou4s.gaugusch.at/ for package management and you'll have a much more usable system. If you want more up-to-date or non-DRM crippled tools, go to http://packman.links2linux.de/.

Ah, Netware...

[wandazulu]

I had plenty of experience with Netware up to 3.12 and in the 199?-1995 timeframe, it was, for a lot of people, the only place where they could store their stuff, the only option being a floppy. At my university, an IBM PS/2 Model 95 running NW with the Mac storage option (whatever it was called) with TCP/IP as well as IPX serviced a hundred and fifty machines, a mix of PCs and 80s and early 90s Macs. NW also handled all the printers (5 or so) and even a couple of early model plotters (if I recall, Lotus 123 1a would only print the graphs to plotters, but I may be wrong about that).

Good times.

It seems that, more than any other OS, Netware is something whose time has clearly passed; everything Netware provided is now available on the user's desktop, regardless of what it boots to. If I remember correctly, NW has been expanded to also be an application server platform for databases, web servers (I believe Apache can run on it), but it seems that it's a more radical configuration than the most offbeat Unix platform. A friend of mine described programming NLMs as nothing like he'd ever done, and nothing he'd ever like to do again.

Novell Should make his own PC

[Anonymous Coward]

They should start selling their own PC with Suse Novell Preinstalled like Apple does. It will be a good way to attract home users and make some money.

netware is no good

[Anonymous Coward]

netware is vastly inferior to Active Directory, people are realizing this and moving on en masse. It's about time if you ask me.

Re:netware is no good

[jav1231]

I disagree. AD is simply painted up better. AD is a direct rip-off of NDS and frankly NDS replicates better.

Re:netware is no good

[jkuespert]

Lets get our technical facts straight here. AD is not a "rip off" of NDS; both NDS and AD are proprietary implementations of the same open protocol. Along this line of reasoning, it follows that NDS is a "rip-off" of Vines ...

Re:netware is no good

[Anonymous Coward]

God is it funny to watch the ignorance that goes on on /.

NetWare is a server operating system. Active Directory is not.

Comparing the two is like comparing apples and martian hamster livers.

But of course, when a dumbshit opens his mouth, people listen.

Re:netware is no good

[hendersj]

Actually, let's get our technical facts correct here.

AD is *somewhat* a rip-off of NDS - in that NDS predated Active Directory, and in fact it's what Microsoft itself has compared Active Directory to. Neither are proprietary implementations of the same open protocol, they're proprietary implementations of open standards.

eDirectory is based on the IETF X.500 directory model. No vendor implements all of X.500, but many of the ideas from X.500 find their ways into almost every directory server on the market.

Active Directory is also somewhat based on X.500, but also throws a lot of LDAP into the picture. It doesn't follow standard naming conventions (from the standpoint of object uniqueness is not per-container, but per domain).

Active Directory is young technology; it has problems with scalability partly because of the way some of the FSMO roles are implemented; for example, the use of a Global Catalog is something that inherently does not scale to very large implementations. Novell tried to do something like this years ago with their Catalog Services component for NDS8, and found the same thing - dredging the directory doesn't scale.

Active Directory lacks flexibility in the area of partitioning; the smallest unit of replication is the domain, and each DC can hold one and only one domain. Redesigning a forest takes a huge amount of effort, and on a large scale, Microsoft has not recommended using ADMT for that, but rather purchasing a third-party product in order to do this.

Monitoring is essential for any directory service - Microsoft offers MOM, which provides a very good function set, but at a hefty per-processor price.

eDirectory (a product Microsoft refuses to compare AD to, and rightfully so, because eDirectory is a very mature directory services product. All of Microsoft's competitive literature refers to NDS) includes iMonitor, which once you learn it (and yes, there is a learning curve) provides you with a great amount of detail on your eDirectory environment. And if you want to hook into a monitoring product, eDirectory is SNMP enabled.

Re:netware is no good

[jkuespert]

I stand corrected on using the word protocol where I obviously meant standard. This stated, however, your supporting facts (though detailed enough to appreciate your position) do nothing to debate my original statement ... AD is not a rip-off of NDS. I have no intention of a feature-by-feature, implementation-by-implementation comparison of the two products. I was only motivated to comment on the fact that I am tired of the age old argument by staunch Novell diehards that NDS is "da bomb" and that AD is just a poor copy. I love an educated debate ... I hate emotional, factless comments tossed around by so many people.

Re:netware is no good

[hendersj]

While I am a Novell die-hard (I in fact work for Novell), I have extensive experience with Active Directory, particularly in large scale designs and deployments. I also have personally met with and discussed Active Directory with Microsoft's product management and engineering managers, and a good friend of mine was in charge of the team that instrumented Active Directory for WMI (which is how Active Directory is monitored by MOM). Incidentally, that person used to work for Novell.

Simply put, I do not come from a position of ignorance on either product, but rather from an in-depth knowledge gained through detailed discussions with the people who have worked on the design of both products. My comment was neither emotional nor factless; it was based on my experience and discussions with people who know.

First off, NDS is an old Novell product; the current product is called eDirectory. So let's start by debating the proper products here. This is a myth that Microsoft continues to propagate even today with their competitive analysis; they refuse to compare to eDirectory because they know that in a feature-by-feature comparison, they lose. They prefer to compare to a product that had limitations of around 5000 objects per container, rather than one that supports millions of objects per container without breaking a sweat.

Coming back to the point of whether AD is a knock-off of NDS or eDirectory, though. It would be fair to say that one product released after another product that competes in the same space is going to incorporate design decisions that make the products comparable. I seriously doubt that Microsoft did their development of Active Directory without looking at the products it was intended to compete against. From a business standpoint, it makes sense to look at the market and make decisions based on what potential customers like about the leading product in the market and then to try to emulate those features that seem most important.

Microsoft already had a replication engine - the one used for replicating the address book in Exchange. That's what Active Directory is largely based on - so in that respect, it's also a knock-off of the Exchange address book data store, too. It uses many concepts that Exchange does - bridgehead servers, for example, allow for highly configurable (and thus also fairly managment-intensive configurations in larger environments) replication patterns. This is a concept Microsoft introduced originally in Exchange.

Microsoft also came from a master/slave replication model from the Domain architecture in NT3 and NT4; this particular type of background led to the introduction in AD (which is multimaster) of issues on Windows 2000 Server like the improper replication of group membership data when two DCs have a change introduced in the same replication cycle. In a master/slave design, all modifications enter at the master (the PDC in a Windows domain structure), so pushing the entire group membership from the PDC to the BDCs doesn't introduce the possibility that it might overwrite a list item that entered the domain at the BDC, because Microsoft prevented changes from entering through its "slave" domain controllers. With Active Directory, they originally kept that behaviour, but if you added a user to a group on DC "A" and another user to the same group on DC "B", the last change wins and the first change is discarded.

This behaviour was corrected in Windows Server 2003's version of Active Directory. A lot of things were fixed in "AD version 2". Some of the things they fixed are things Novell discovered almost 10 years ago with the first versions of NDS, however - so to that end, it's also fair to say that Microsoft didn't learn as much about directory services as they could have from Novell.

Re:netware is no good

[jkuespert]

Call off the dogs man .... If my last post was not clear enough, let me point out a few things. My comment of, "I hate emotional, factless comments..." were not directed toward you. On the contrary, in my second sentence I indicated that your facts were clear and thorough. The "I am tired of the age old argument by staunch Novell diehards..." comment was a general reference to the great majority of posts from Novell admins and engineers who really have not taken the time, or have the ability, to objectively compare and contrast the technical differences (implementation and design) between NDS and AD, yet feel the need to toss their opinions into the mix with no supportive basis of fact. Your background and depth of knowledge with NDS is recognized. I'll end my consensus with this; Yes, eDirectory is a more mature product (I felt the need to state this because you mentioned the product twice). It would be irresponsible (as well as ignorant) to make a deliberate statement to the contrary. I dont see anywhere above where this comparison was introduced. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the post that I replied to was one of those unsubstantiated comments. "Re:netware is no good(Score:2) by jav1231 (539129) on Wednesday March 08, @04:49AM (#14873697) I disagree. AD is simply painted up better. AD is a direct rip-off of NDS and frankly NDS replicates better." Unlike your posts, his (or hers) contains no supportive arguments. Clear enough?

Re:netware is no good

[hendersj]

I think we're both "suffering" (not really the right word here, but I can't think of one that fits better here) from the same thing - being tired of uneducated points of view (no, I'm not saying yours is - I've reread the comments and - mea culpa - I misread the direction of the discussion). We both seem to share the same intolerance for ignorance.

My bad - please accept my apologies.

Re:netware is no good

[jkuespert]

None required but thanks for the offer. As previously noted, I dig a good educated debate. Though a bit off topic, this sub-thread has been the light of an otherwise dull day :-) Differing perspectives (Ford or Chevy anyone?)is what this medium is all about. If I need a qualified eDirectory SME, I know who to call :b

No wonder when Novell doesn't ...

[wysiwia]

tackle the most important Linux problems. The OSDL Linux desktop survey (http://www.osdl.org/dtl/DTL_Survey_Report_Nov2005 .pdf) clearly lists Application support as the first top inhibitor to Linux adoption and Novell's own Cool-Solutions web site (http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/16798 .html) shows that Quickbooks is the most wanted Linux application. So why doesn't Novell sponsor a real OpenSource alternative?

No I don't mean to sponsor GnuCash, I mean to build up a cross-platform solution which is able to compete against Quickbooks on all platform (including Windows). I guess it doesn't need more that just a few developers to create an alternative within halve a year and within a year Quickbooks will notice its business diminish. Well lets see then how all the others Windows-Only vendors will react when they see what happened to Quickbooks.

I'm quite sure these few developers have a much more important impact on the success of Linux that dropping another fifty developers into Suse. It will even be better for Suse if these few developers are taken temporarily away from it.

The way to success is quite easy when you follow a few rules:

- don't have unsolvable obstacles
- don't have killer arguments against you
- don't have inhibitors
- do have something valuable the others don't have
- look at our products with the eyes of your customers or users
- ...

O. Wyss

Re:No wonder when Novell doesn't ...

[John Hurliman]

The solution to supporting Quickbooks is not an OSS alternative to it, at least today. Quickbooks has mostly evolved in to a subscription plan software, where you pay annual fees for new versions as the old versions go unsupported very quickly, payroll and tax information updates, support calls, etc. Companies invest a lot of time in to getting everything working in Quickbooks, purchasing or developing add-ons specific to their industry or company, and pouring sunk costs in to the subscription plan. The value of software is not your userbase, but the cost to your userbase to switch to a competitor.

There are several competitors to Quickbooks out there, but due to successful advertising and fear of using a lesser known piece of software (will my accountant be familiar with it? will data entry clerks have more trouble using it?) has given Intuit a good chunk of the market, even though I wouldn't say it's technically superior to the competitors in any aspect.

Re:No wonder when Novell doesn't ...

[Shadowlore]

No I don't mean to sponsor GnuCash, I mean to build up a cross-platform solution which is able to compete against Quickbooks on all platform (including Windows)

If Novell were to put significant development resources behind GnuCash, it certainly could be runnable and usable and competitive on Linux, OSX, and Windows. Why start from scratch?

Troll? WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some mods are on crack... If anything this is insighful!

Novell was extremely popular at some point (the netware v3 days, mid 90s), then hordes of people started migrating to NT4 to never come back. v4 installs never were as common, and I've only seen a handful of v5 installs. The Netware days are over, big time. Just like OS/2 (which wasn't a bad OS at all at the time). Every freakin' thing Novell bought or touched since then somehow ended up being a failure in a way or another (if you think Sun missed the boat a few times, these ppl are no better). Their only chance of staying in business is suse, and lately I'm seeing interest in that distro drop a lot (especially with v10). Unless they can manage to suck enough of RH's support business to fund themselves (not necessarily a good thing), I don't think they'll live much longer. Not a bad distro, but not good enough to be worth paying for it when you consider the alternatives, and unless loads of enterprises move to linux and pay mega $ for support, they're done. So essentially, they HAVE been dying slowly.

Whoever modded that troll, lay off the crack, really.

Occam's Razor

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, if you are going to gut your network, you may as well just implement Active Directory.

Since the majority of organizations already have a Windows network going anyhow, they can just reap the numerous benefits AD gives them in terms of managing their desktops. It's Occam's Razor.

What does Netware do better? Umm... printing... and... um... it does... um... printing really good too. Oh, and did I say printing?

Pricing is everything (tech better be good, too)

[tulare]

Right now, Netware simply costs too freaking much IMO. Yes, other things are also spendy, but when I'm looking for directory services, which I currently am, here are the figures I'm faced with:

1. Netware: About 40 bucks per user
2. MS AD: About 10 bucks per user
3. Fedora Directory Server: About zilch.

No matter which way you cut it, I'm going to have to put in a boatload of time refactoring a painted-in-the-corner directory model with about 1400 users and 500 devices in this K12 school district. Add to that the insanity of Netware requiring Windows volumes to be FAT32 formatted (this might be out of date - if so I expect the LARTs to rain down appropriately), I just don't see any chance of going with Netware. It's a real pity, too: I actually think SuSE is an excellent desktop distribution, and deploy it here for LTSP solutions and for my own personal desktop. I imagine SuSE would probably play pretty nicely in an OES environment. But it's too much coin, and the tech just sucks at this point as far as I can see, and we ain't got no money.

So I'm stuck trying to decide between Active Directory and FDS. Wait - no I'm not ;-)

Ximian leadership a huge liability

[Anonymous Coward]

The leadership of Ximian that seems to have taken over the Linux direction is an incredible liability for Novell and SuSE. Ximian was a company and a group that could never deliver a polished product that people would actually use. They really saw Novell as a platform for their own egos, and not really a platform actually to serve people, customers, and community.

SuSE was an amazing product and one of the best examples of a fully integrated GUI experience for Linux, where you didn't have to use the command line to use the system. It had polish, and clarity in what it was trying to be.

Compare that to all this Novell Desktop, SuSE branding confusion, coupled with triple alpha software like Beagle, and horrendous monstrosities like .MONO, and you can see why people are not eager to jump on the Novell Linux bandwagon. What is their main leadership qualification?

Re:Ximian leadership a huge liability

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree.

Ximian and MONO clearly indicate something is terribly wrong with Novell's grasp of the Linux/opensource market.

Re:Ximian leadership a huge liability

[Anonymous Coward]

Which ever way you want to look at it, Mono is a pending disaster for somebody.

Re:Ximian leadership a huge liability

[jav1231]

I agree. Buy betting on Ximian and Mono, Novell essentially decided Gnome would be the platform. Whether your Gnome or KDE inclined, you have to admit dumping KDE when that's SuSE's base was a bad idea. "Hey! I have a great idea! Let's move to another GUI platform and alienate the one set of users that bring the most to the table on SuSE!?" As for Ximian and Mono, Novell was betting on enterprise apps there. Ximian was to provide a polished look and feel and Mono would bring .Net to Linux. They forgot one key factor, no one but Miguel loves Mono. (BTW, aren't we due for another Miguel interview to pop up somewhere?)

Re:Ximian leadership a huge liability

[si618]

I agree that it seems odd to ditch KDE for Gnome when SuSE was mostly KDE to start with (maybe they like the success Ubuntu has?), but it's a pure troll who says no-one except Miguel loves Mono.

Re:Ximian leadership a huge liability

[jav1231]

"pure troll who says no-one except Miguel loves Mono"
Maybe others "like" it then. I submit that it's basically a non-app. I know of no one using it seriously. Yet, we're constantly told of how great its GOING to be. Usually, by Miguel himself.

Re:Ximian leadership a huge liability

[si618]

For sure Miguel is a Mono evangelist, and yes i've also read articles like:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/02/11/mono_and_d otgnu_whats/

And yes there seem to be few companies using Mono at the moment, but for me, as a developer who gets paid to write proprietary software, but who would rather get paid to develop open source software (run on open source operating systems) it's gives me the option of using a completely open source environment, and a mechanism to make the transition.

As an example, I have already been able to successfully use Mono to run a project I built to handle Subversion administration using NAnt.

http://svn.berlios.de/viewcvs/subnant/trunk/README .txt?view=markup

At work we're a Windows shop (so .net CLR) so Subnant runs on that, at home, and for anyone else who wants to run it, the Mono version (on Windows or Linux) runs all the tests run and performs nearly on par with the .net CLR (Mono performance has increased significantly in recent iterations)

I'm currently in the planning phase for a more ambitious open source healthcare-related project, and plan to develop that so it can use either a completely free open source software stack (Linux->Mono->MonoRail->ActiveRecord->Firebird) or a more traditional proprietary stack (Windows->.NET CLR->MonoRail->ActiveRecord->SQL Server).

Sure this means i've got more work setting up my build process and more testing on multiple operating sytems and database environments, but at least it gives me (and hopefully anyone who wants to use the software) choice, and choice is good!

Re:Ximian leadership a huge liability

[si618]

> I know of no one using it seriously.

http://www.mfconsulting.com/blog/archives/000126.h tml

So now you do :)

If Novell would open their tech...

[CarpetShark]

If Novell would open up technologies like ZENWorks, they might get some real interest. An enterprise-wide administration solution (along the lines of active directory) is available in purely Free Software, and it's eventually going to be simplified and packaged for everyone. But Novell have a head start in this stuff: they could make a significant contribution to Linux, and make their own distros famous for enterprise use, if they want to. It NEEDS to be open though, or it's useless to those of us who want to build add-on admin tools and who want to install it across a heterogeneous network.

Instead, they horde their tech, and don't even bother to advertise it much. I'm not really surprised they're failing with that strategy; it has Commodore written all over it.

Re:If Novell would open their tech...

[Total_Wimp]

If Novell would open up technologies like ZENWorks, they might get some real interest.

This is a great observation. We're migrating off of NetWare because of the hassle of maintaining two directories(We also have ADS), amoung other reasons. We'd love to keep ZENWorks, but guess what? You still have to maintain two directories.

My converstations with supporters of this are almost commical.

ZENWorks Supporter (SUP): ZEN supports ADS!
ZENWorks Skeptic (Skep): Great! I don't have to support multiple directories!
SUP: Well, actually you do, but they sync, so you don't have extra maintenance!
Skep: Ok, so I get to do all my administration in ADS, right?
SUP: Well, no, you have to use Console One, but they're syncing so you don't have to worry about maintaining seperate user accounts!
Skep: So I don't have to worry about eDir logons, right?
SUP: well, you actually have to logon to eDir.
Skep: But it's clientless, right?
SUP: Absolutely! No netware client, you just have to logon to eDir through the ZENWorks client.
Skep: How is that clientless?
SUP: There's no NetWare client, so it's clientless.
Skep: Um.
Skep: I've had problems with maintaining two seperate accounts in the past. For example, password complexity, expiration, etc are all handled differently in the two directories and this has led to inconsistant password policy.
SUP: ZENworks has some great policy options!
Skep: Yes, I understand this, but how do I reconcile eDir's grace logons with ADSs warnings before expiration? This kind of seems like a hassle to me.
SUP: You don't need to worry, the directories are synced! The syncing is so good, you won't have any problems.
Skep: But I am having problems.
SUP: Those aren't really problems. You just don't understand.
Skep: I do understand, and I also don't want a client that replaces my Windows logon GINA.
SUP: The client is not a problem. You'll like it.
Skep: um.

If ZENWorks was fully integrated into ADS and had no seperate logon, we'd use it. ZEN is awesome. But as long as Novell and its supporters fail to see issues with the things that we think are issues, we're going to seek other options.

TW

Re:If Novell would open their tech...

[whereareweheadedto]

I have been working with Novell for almost four years and have run into many similar arguments. But there are some facts that Slashdoters and others often ignore. And that's a relationship between Novell's products. You can't run ZENworks Desktop management with directories other than eDIrectory. Certain applications work only with other Novell applications, while Novell still gives out as much as they can without geopardizing market shares of their flagship products. Regarding my customer base, it always comes down to sensible advice. Some need MS, others don't. Maybe you needed Novell better than MS? Just an example from one of my clients: three years ago they had some 10 MS servers, 10 Netware, 5 linux servers. They decided to ditch Netware and move to MS. Their current situation: some 40 MS servers, 10 or less linux servers and 7 Netware servers. They still employ eDirectory as their primary directory (they have three), ZENworks. I actually installed a new OES Netware server last week to host their DNS and DHCP services. Will probably be doing 3-node cluster later this year... They took two years of planning the ditch and in the end they have 2 times the servers they did in the beginning. They found no viable option to Novell's services...

Apples and Oranges....

[soren42]

Novell is no doubt more than aware that comparing NetWare to Linux is an unfair comparison, just as comparing earnings from this point last year is. Let's take a quick rundown of some differences:

NetWare vs. Linux:

• NetWare is typically licensed per-user, Linux per-server - this is a HUGE difference! For a large enterprise for, let's say 100,000 NetWare users, Novell was licensing annually on a per-user basis. This could come out to millions of dollars if they even charged $10-$20/user (approximately the list price based on 50-100 user bundles). SUSE Linux, on the other hand, is no doubt licensed per-server. That same enterprise can probably support those same users with far fewer servers - let's use an estimate of 2000. Even at the list price of $899 for up to 16 CPUs, that is still a huge shortfall. So, it a significantly different pricing model.
• NetWare was entirely developed in-house - alright, so it was based on DOS, but for all intensive purposes, Novell had a captive developer community, entirely controlled product direction, cost, support, and other factors. With Linux, Novell has managed to trade some of the cost of development for total control of the product - but they still must support and maintain all those users still running NetWare 3(good heavens!), 4, 5, and 6. So, they need almost twice the support staff, and we already discussed the falling revenue. Plus, they still support and patch some versions of NetWare 6, so they are some developers still committed to NetWare.
• The dynamics of their community has changed - in the 90's, the certification to have was the CNE. It meant something. Novell had a huge community of resellers, developers, support engineers, and other partners - essentially under their thumb. Now, they have to compete as just another Linux vendor. Why be just a Novell partner when I can partner with Red Hat, IBM, HP, and everyone else? Why get a Novell CLP9 or CLE9 certification, when I can get the more recognized LPI certification - or (worse, from their perspective) an RHCE certification?
• Their customers' path away has not been Linux - it's been Windows - Novell has been steadily losing file and print customers for years to Microsoft. No offense, people, but face it: most former NetWare admins moved on to WinNT and Win2K years ago. Very few moved on to UNIX or Linux - there are certainly some, but most people that identified themselves as CNE's moved on to be MSCE's, not RHCE's. The problem is, customers are still moving en masse to Windows, and the Linux strategy from Novell has not prevented that.

Okay - I've beat up the Linux/NetWare differences enough, but what about the business differences, and their impact on earnings?

• One year ago, the Microsoft settlement boosted earnings - if you don't get this one, RTFA. The MS settlement was a nice temporary earnings boost, but Novell knew that. Why the market glossed over it still amazes me, but then, it's the sort of thing tech investors tend to do.
• Novell has matured in the past year - I know there's been a lot of negative press about the leadership changes and departures at Novell - especially here at Slashdot, but let me tell you - this is what a company undergoing a major merger integration needs. Especially one changing it's fundamental vision and product focus. Some of the losses were unfortunate - Chris Stone, for example. Some just underscored the growing pains of a company merging several cultures at once - open source and proprietary, US and Germany, GNOME and KDE - too many for all the chiefs to stay and agree. However, IMHO, the current leadership and vision at Novell is remarkable. Novell has done a superb job of selecting the best and brightest from their talent pool to lead the company, and their corporate vision and strategy demonstrate that.
• Novell has strived to maintain product continuity - even at the expense of earnings. Doesn'

Re:Apples and Oranges....

[jadel]

NetWare was *the* file and print server for a very long time, however I think they have made a few dodgy technical decisions in recent years - We currently use no less than *three* different administration programs - but the killer is patch management. So man patches break underlying functionality that finding a stable patchlevel is so difficult that any kind of upgrade is done with only the upmost trepidation.
Believe me I'm talking from painful experience here....

Re:Apples and Oranges....

[Kirth]

Their customers' path away has not been Linux - it's been Windows

Right. And that's exactly why I think Novells path with Linux is the right one -- because meddling with Microsoft will kill you, and it nearly killed Novell.

You may offer (print- and fileserver) solutions for Windows-clients for years, but in the end, Microsoft will offer those itself, and then you've lost. The same applies just about to anything. Either your company gets killed, or bought by Microsoft. There is no future in the Microsoft-market.

Re:Apples and Oranges....

[dan the person]

alright, so it was based on DOS

It wasn't based on DOS! It used DOS as a bootloader. There was a security option to unload DOS when you started netware.

Re:Apples and Oranges....

[hendersj]

> alright, so it was based on DOS, but for all intensive purposes,

<sigh>

NetWare uses DOS as a bootstrap. Period. The engineers at Novell who developed the loader mechanism back in the NetWare 3 days (NetWare 2.15 didn't use DOS as a bootstrap, though you could run non-dedicated mode and have a second "session" that ran DOS so the machine could be used as a workstation as well) decided that since DOS already gets a system started up, there was no need to reinvent the wheel.

SERVER.EXE loads from DOS; the NetWare kernel takes over, and DOS is left there for real-mode access to the floppy drive (and CD-ROM drive IFF you loaded the CD-ROM driver stuff in DOS before loading SERVER.EXE - this was common for installations back before access to CD-ROM drives were standardized and a lot of the drives used funky proprietary cards that needed special drivers rather than a standard, universal IDE or SCSI interface). Once the NetWare kernel takes over, DOS is not necessary; the fact that there has been a REMOVE DOS command on NetWare demonstrates this (though this has been removed from NetWare 6.5 and OES/NetWare and may even have been removed from NetWare 6; it was there to increase the memory pool in earlier versions because memory was so expensive in the past; now with memory as cheap as it is, there's no need to conserve that extra couple hundred K that DOS uses).

Nothing personal here, I just get tired of people making uninformed assertions like this - and there are several people here who have incorrectly made this comment because they assumed they knew how it worked rather than learning how it worked. NetWare IS NOT a DOS application, but lots of people believe very firmly it is. The NetWare *loader* is a DOS application.

Re:Apples and Oranges....

[123info]

Can you help me understand what you meant by, "the killer is patch management."? Is this for NetWare 6.0, 6.5, or OES Linux? Can you give some specific examples (patch name)? Thanks

English Nazi Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

NetWare was entirely developed in-house - alright, so it was based on DOS, but for all intensive purposes, Novell had a captive developer community, entirely controlled product direction, cost, support, and other factors.

Ahem, do you mean intents and purposes? I grimace every time I see such bastardization of the English language.

I wouldn't count out Novell

[JRGhaddar]

Novell seems to be making deals with SuSE.

Swiss Government
Novell is leading linux in china

I mean come on I don't think the Swiss Gov't is going to pick a company that doesn't know what they are doing.

Redhat is a great example of how a linux company can be successful. Novell is backed by IBM, and has partnerships all over the place like Redhat. I think Novell is going to surprise a lot of people.

Hey even their old CEO is now the CEO of Google. They have too many ties to too many power players for them not to be a success.

Huh?

[dtietze]

Say what? The decline is plummeting? If the decline is plummeting - does that mean that sales are increasing? Is this a posh double negative?

Dan.
Remember - Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.

Re:Huh?

[donscarletti]

Literally interpreted, it would mean that they have a large second derivative. That means that the first derivative will become greater than zero on a long enough time frame and it will increase, but maybe not now.

IBM and Novell

[bubulubugoth]

Novell isnt alone with SuSe.

IBM is buying a lot from Novell, and not from redhat.

For example. Novell has this tiny distributions for Point Of Sale Hardware, called Novell SuSe Linux Point of Sal NSLPOS or NLSpos, it depends how you order the words.

IBM has a HUGE hardware POS, and they build IRES, IBM Retail Enterprise Solution on TOP of Novell`s NLSPOS

Also, Novell has support for the brand new OpenPower, Xseries and so on, also redhat, but the difference, is that, Redhat charges you by instance, and Novell charges you by hardware, and since IBM is preaching the "consolidate on big hardware using LPAR (hardware virtualization) on their machines, Novell offers a much more "from the book to the TCO financial benefits...

So I really think that Novell will survive and will have a huge market, more market than RedHat, they are not so cocky about them self as RedHat, Novell wants money, not fame...

Redhat, seems to seek for fame... and money...

Re:IBM and Novell

[Erwos]

"IBM is buying a lot from Novell, and not from redhat."

You're joking, right? This statement alone disqualifies whatever else you have to say, because it's obvious YOU HAVE NO CLUE. Red Hat and IBM have a close partnership. IBM constantly plays it up whenever they come with the sales pitches. You can get RHEL on practically anything IBM sells. You're going to have to quantify your statement with hard facts before anyone believes it. You can do that, right?

Note that I'm not arguing IBM doesn't have a close relationship with SuSE (Novell, now), too.

"So I really think that Novell will survive and will have a huge market, more market than RedHat, they are not so cocky about them self as RedHat, Novell wants money, not fame..."

That's a laughable assertion. You don't think there are huge egos at Novell? The reason you keep hearing about Red Hat on Slashdot is that they're continually giving to the community. Aiglx, GFS, scheduler enhancements, gcc development, etc. - if Red Hat gets fame and ego boosts like that, they're A-OK in my book. The folks at Novell are starting to realize this - which is why you're seeing them open-source more and more stuff, and backpedal somewhat on their "hybrid open-source proprietary" philosophy they were pitching shortly after the merger (it didn't win them many friends).[1]

You obviously have some rather pre-conceived notions about Red Hat and Novell. Sorry if the facts get in the way.

I think SuSE is a fine distro, but Novell is flailing about to a large extent with regards to how to evolve itself. They'll probably survive, but it's going to be painful.

-Erwos

[1] I received several sales pitches from them.

They lack vison

[alonso]

I think that they lack in house vision, and they have lost the Suse visionary.
I was a big fun of suse, and I now use opensuse, but the messages that novell sends are confusing. Whitch is the main desktop platform kde, gnome or both?
They have switched the engine of yast (dependencies resolver) to the engine of
redcarpet in beta 5 of opensuse 10.1. I think that there are other examples....
And they have problem in working with community see Xgl vs Xegl or AppArmor vs SeLinux, I haven't the technical skill to decide which solution is the best but these project have no community involvement, in contrary RedHat do everything with community in mind.... and Red Hat is very successful.

P.S.
I know my english is not percet :)

Re:They lack vison

[eGuy]

As a Novell employee I disagree on all of your arguments but one - the kde versus gnome - I wish we could pick one but that ain't happening.

Yast and Redcarpet: Integrating redcarpet into yast was the right way to go. Since redcarpet (from Ximian) and Yast (from Suse) were able to collaborate and come out with a better solution shows that they have vision and execute the vision.

AppArmor vs SeLinux: see security wars Summary: Novell buys a best of breed security solution, then gives it to the community. RedHat wines: "In my opinion, Novell wants to split the market...".

Xgl vs Xegl: I don't see any confusion here, I think maybe you mean aiglx Xegl is a completely new Xserver. So to compare the three projects: Xegl = really hard, Xgl = hard, aiglx = easy.
I think the confusion around this comes from redHat. Novell chose Xgl, RedHat chose aiglx, Novell gets the credit, Redhat complains. Xegl is still a ways off.

Novell is putting significant investment into open source software (OpenOffice, Hula, Evolution, Xgl, AppArmor, Yast, iFolder, Gnome, KDE, SAMBA, and the kernel itself, and I'm sure other projects I'm not aware of) Despite the complaining from RedHat they deserve some respect.

With all that, it will it takes time to build momentum. Without a doubt the momentum for Linux from Novell is building, investors are simply upset that Novell is not there yet. The fact that Novell is number one in China is a signficant accomplishment that will result in revenue in the future.

No Y2K bug that I saw.

[khasim]

I just replaced two NetWare 4.11 servers in 2005. They were running just fine.

I was consulting back in 1999-2000 and I never saw any Y2K problems with NetWare.

Re:No Y2K bug that I saw.

[nighty5]

Officially, the first release of Novell Netware to be Y2k compliant was 3.12.

I remember because I had lots of jobs pre 2000 to patch a whole bunch of them for my customers.

Re:No Y2K bug that I saw.

[bobcat7677]

OK, so it was 3 to 4, not 5 to 6. Give me a break, it was 6 years ago!

Not quite.

[khasim]

I hear that Novell was pushing really hard for IPX/SPX to be the protocol for the internet, which was silly and impossible because it's a broadcast protocol.

No. They were pushing for IPX to IP gateways/proxy servers so that a local network could run IPX (far less configuration than TCP/IP back then) and still access Internet services, securely. Don't forget that back then people were still selling 3rd party TCP/IP stacks.

Then they put off implementing TCP/IP for a million years, while the internet (and networks connected to it) were taking off on TCP/IP.

On the client, it wasn't very difficult to run IPX and TCP/IP. What they did not do was offer their NetWare file system access via TCP/IP until the 5.x series.

I also hear that Novell put a lot of work into Directory Access Protocol (DAP) for network management databases.

In a way. They focused on using the X.500 standard for their NDS product.

DAP grew and grew and was too bulky to be popularly used.

No. X.500 was designed to handle just about everything in the world. Novell implemented a sub-set of it.

The problem was that Novell did that back when most people were still on NetWare 3.12 or using a Windows domain model.

Admin'ing an NDS tree is more work and takes more expertise. Novell failed to sell people on the benefits of a directory service.

Somebody made up Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which is now used by Microsoft for Active Directory.

LDAP is also a sub-set of the X.500 standard.

Active Directory can talk to LDAP, but it is not LDAP.

NDS can talk to LDAP, but it is not LDAP. Novell even has NLDAP (Novell LDAP) implemented as a server process.

The problems Novell had were:

#1. They made very solid products. There wasn't any reason for small shops to dump NetWare 3.12 and upgrade to 4.x or 5.x or 6.x now.

#2. They VIGOROUSLY defended their licensing revenue. A NetWare server would broadcast it's serial number and if it saw another server using it, it would kick all the users off of it. Meanwhile, anyone could install 1,000 NT servers with a single license number.

#3. Their servers sucked as application servers. But they rocked as file and print servers. But more and more apps were moving to the server.

#4. Novell tried to buy their way into a fight with Microsoft on the desktop with WordPerfect and such.

#5. Today, they are still back in the early 1990's.
5a. Patching GroupWise is more difficult than patching Win2K or
  Debian.
5b. Patching NetWare 6.5 is more difficult ... come on! Debian's solved that problem years ago! Learn from them.
5c. Novell's sales force sucks ass at the small company level. They simply refuse to tell you how to buy their products and even what their products are.
5d. NWAdmin is needed for some admin tasks. Console1 is needed for others. NoRM is needed for yet others.
5e. In order to run some of the BASIC admin utilities, you have to correctly configure NetWare + Apache + Tomcat + Java + LDAP/NLDAP + their stupid Tomcat app + SSL (and I may have left out a sub-system or two). What fucking moron thought that THAT would be a good idea? And the fucking app doesn't even uninstall cleanly so if you do make a mistake, you have to look up how to remove all the little bits so you can re-install it.
5f. Great. You like webservers and such. But why the fuck does EVERY app have to be run via the web with its own fucking ports?

I can go on and on and on about this. Really. Novell has, today, managed to incorporate EVERY bad idea for the last 20 years from every vendor out there.

Seriously. Grab the latest service pack for NetWare 6.5 and make sure you read the install text. You'll have to dig down to a sub-directory to make sure you install 2 sub-items that are NOT automatically installed when you install the service pack but which are required.

Learn from Debian, Novell. Patching your system should be even EASIER than Windows Update.

Re:Not quite.

[GooberToo]

Active Directory can talk to LDAP, but it is not LDAP.

Very common misconception! LDAP is a protocol. LDAP says nothing of the backend storage mechanism. AD is an LDAP server. Anyone that tells you otherwise is sadly misinfomred. Anything that serves data via the LDAP protocol is a LDAP server.

Re:Not quite.

[Hasai]

Much as I hate to, I have to agree with just-about everything the parent states, particularly regarding Novell's Marketing department. Nowhere have I seen such incompetence last so long (except perhaps in the White House).

Patching a Novell server is not trivial, topped only by GroupWise patching, which I look upon with dread. And God help you if you left out a package on install and now want to add it to a patched server.

Novell used to have an excellent administration model, where you went to a single program (NWAdmin) to do just about everything that needed to be done. Then Novell jumped onto the Java bandwagon and out stumbled ConsoleOne; the slowest, most bloated nightmare I've ever seen. Then even before all functionality could be ported to C1, here came the web interfaces; the most fragile, most confusing mess on the planet. AND THERE'S STILL STUFF STUCK ON NWADMIN!!! They've gone schizo at Novell, I swear it.

Now there's OES, a cross between NW6 and SLES9. If you've both Netware and Linux expertise in-house, it's a quite attractive server package, but if you've only Linux people, or you're pure Netware, or (most likely) neither, you're lost at sea. To top it off, I have been waiting since the release of OES to see a training package for it. I'm still waiting. I suspect I'll still be waiting for quite some time. Hey, Novell: do you really think I'm going to put a system into production that I have NO TRAINING FOR???

There are only two reasons that I haven't jumped-ship yet: the first is NDS (what those Marketing losers call 'eDirectory'), which makes AD look positively pathetic in comparison; the second is server stability. If those two points go the way of everything else, I'm outta here.

'Nuff said.

Re:Not quite.

[OnlineAlias]

You are so right. Novell jumped on every bandwagon there was, the biggest being that steaming pile Console One. They SO had it with NWadmin..light, fast, intuitive. Ah, but then java came along. Everything had to be java. Java java java. Even though they had a great method for administering servers (rconsole, in the rare case one needed to go to a console), they had to take that java they had there and port an X.11 GUI to the server. No one asked for it, it wasn't required, but they did it anyway. This created an opportunity for them to appease the Windows people by being able to administer the server from the server. The problem is it isn't a Windows server! Arg..it is such a mess. To this day you can't administer printers without NWadmin. Talk about disjointed product planning. It is almost like they are trying to drive away their faithful....

Re:Not quite.

[lgarner]

"They SO had it with NWadmin." I'd say they had it better with NetAdmin. I had so much trouble with NWadmin snapins that I felt like I was being penalized by Novell for using many of their products. If you stick with NW and *maybe* GW, it was ok. Throw in NDS4NT, BorderManger, Zenworks, Managewise and you're lucky if NWAdmin even runs. "...appease the Windows people by being able to administer the server from the server." Imagine that. Managing a server from the server. What a concept! I'll have to see if that can be done on Linux, Solaris, AS400 and OSX servers. I never thought of that. Seriously, the implementation of the server GUI was terrible, mostly because C1 on the server couldn't admin everything that C1 on the PC could do. Java "run anywhere"? I don't think so. I think the NW's inability to be managed at the server was a symptom of a greater problem. Novell forced us to buy products from their competitor in order to use NW. Imaging going to a Chevy dealer to buy a car, only to find it comes with no seats. "You'll have to buy those from the Ford dealer down the street", they say, "and make sure you get one that fits your Chevy". When you get to the Ford dealer, you find out that they not only sell seats, they sell whole cars with the compatible seats installed.

Re:Not quite.

[OnlineAlias]

I don't think having to buy a different product in order to manage a Netware system is a problem. The whole world has pretty much accepted defeat that Windows is the default desktop OS. I mean, any software you buy (for the most part) requires in some fasion that you buy Windows to run it. I guess my point is that it worked.

The plugin thing, yes, was a bit of a pain. It wasn't all roses...

Re:Pricing is everything (tech better be good, too

[Degrees]

Isn't there an additional cost per-seat for the MS Windows CAL?

We did a comparison about a year and a half ago, and the MS licenses (for comparable Novell services) were cheaper - but not by much. It was something like a nine year return on investment (which your finance person would tell you is not worth it).

Of course, what you really want is what the directory gets you: if all you need is login name + password, then it doesn't make sense to pay a lot per seat. If you need more, then it may be worth the money. For example, adding ZENworks gives you the ability to remote-control the desktop, and even re-image the desktop, all from eDirectory. Spending money on Ghost?, Hassling with getting your users to provide you with their IP address (which on a locked down machine means more work on your end) for remote control? It all costs money.

Rather like Metcalf's law, the value of a directory increases with the extended services it enables.

FWIW, eDirectory 8.8 on Windows does now requires NTFS. ... you can install eDirectory only on an NTFS partition. I don't know when that change was made.

what do you expect...

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect from a company which had to abandon their own technology (the netware kernel). I just hope they don't do to suse what they did to every other piece of technology they acquired (remenber wordperfect)...

Our novell infrastructure is no where near as stable as our redhat and Windows infrastructures which run comparable services.

Active Directory kinda sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies who have invested big in MS's domain model are spending millions of dollars and year to convert to AD. It is a huge money pit for almost no gain for MS users.

It essentially forces you to upgrade all your latest servers to Windows 2003 just for things to *work*.

Re:Active Directory kinda sucks

[jkuespert]

Umm ... huh? I'm going to have to pull your punk card here; if you're capable of dissecting the individual technologies of a suitably deployed AD, as well as their holistic impact to an organization, please post something more significant here and we can deliberate on this comment.

Give them Groupwise!

[jayhawk88]

I have a co-worker who recently went to a Novell/Suse training class, and from what he tells me they were very good at drinking the Kool-Aid. Lots of talk in terms of not "if" but "when you switch your entire company to Suse Desktop", you should have all your servers upgraded within the year, that kind of stuff. Look, I know Novell has to be behind their stuff, but I doubt there are very many companies out there who can just have all their servers upgraded in that kind of time frame, let alone totally drop Windows on the desktop.

Besides, Novell's immediate problem is not getting Suse out there to it's customers. It's coming, we know it, and even if we don't like it we're going to move there eventually. Novell's big problem is losing current Netware/GW customers, and attracting new ones.

Open source Groupwise. It seems so obvious to me I can't believe Novell isn't doing this, they're pretty much in the process of abandoning GW anyway. Linux is desperate for a full-featured, one-stop Groupware product. How many Suse servers would you sell if open source GW was out there? How many current Netware customers would you save from switching over to Exchange?

Re:Give them Groupwise!

[beep999]

Open source Groupwise. It seems so obvious to me I can't believe Novell isn't doing this, they're pretty much in the process of abandoning GW anyway.

Are you crazy? What evidence do you have that Novell is actually abandoning Groupwise? Groupwise has over 35 million users, the vast majority running the latest 2 versions (6.5 and 7.0). Even Exchange's installed base consists of a lot unupgraded older versions.

Groupwise is currently the 3rd largest enterprise groupware system out there (Exchange=1, Lotus=2), but Lotus Notes is seeing very few new installs so it probably won't be long until Groupwise is solidly in the number 2 spot. I know first hand that Groupwise is one of the most heavily pushed Novell products by their sales force and they just came out with a greatly enhanced new version. That doesn't sound like a product being abandoned to me...

Re:Give them Groupwise!

[PapaZit]

You mean something like Hula?

Hula's actually an Open Source Netmail, but they're going to be porting major new features from Groupwise to Hula.

Re:Give them Groupwise!

[jayhawk88]

I know it's going to be a long time before GW goes anywhere, and perhaps "abandon" is a harsh word, but everything we've seen coming out of Orem for the past 3 years or so has been "blah blah blah eDirectory blah blah Identify Management blah blah Suse Desktop....and oh yeah we still have that Groupwise thing". Maybe it's just because GW is such a horse, but considering what a kick-ass Groupware platform it is, they just never seem to give it the spotlight. Especially since the Suse purchase.

Really it just kind of baffles me how Novell isn't out there beating the GW drum as loudly as possible at every opportunity. Maybe it's just my work environment, but our users LIVE in Groupwise. It runs this place, and that's not hyperbole in any way. I really think an open source GW would move more copies of Suse for Novell than anything else.

Re:Give them Groupwise!

[AELinuxGuy]

Really it just kind of baffles me how Novell isn't out there beating the GW drum as loudly as possible at every opportunity.

I absolutely agree! It drives me crazy that all of these "groupware packages on Linux" comparisons (i.e. like in eWeek) never include Groupwise. The only explanation for this blatant ommission is that the product is not being pushed like it deserves to be. To my knowledge, there is *nothing* that stands up to Exchange like this product. Users can continue to use Outlook if they like with *full* groupware features (not just the IMAP stuff), it has an amazing webmail client in 7.0, it supports a ton of commercial add-ons (anti-virus, anti-spam, Blackberry, Intellisync), and -best of all- it runs like a beast on a 2.6 series kernel.

Re:Pricing is everything (tech better be good, too

[T-Ranger]

You are comparing different products. eDirectory has a list price of $0.50 per user. Thats right, 50 cents. eDir will run on just about anything, and doesn't need Netware.

Didn't Have An App Server??

[Black-Man]

What are you talking about? I admin'd a 3.1x site in the early 90's that had Applications running in Netware - MSoft apps, Groupwise (Novell's groupware), and a Dbase database.

They were crushed by Microsoft. End of story. They should of ditched their proprietary Netware long ago - they even resisted supporting TCP/IP for the longest time! How forward thinking was that??

Re:Didn't Have An App Server??

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you didn't. You had apps running in Windows, served by a Netware file server. This is completely different from running apps from an app server such as Lotus Domino 3.x on Netware, which was a nightmare, trust me. I am talking mandatory daily reboots.

The story out of Iris, the Lotus Notes dev shop, was that Netware was a major pain to code for.

As for TCP/IP, Novell's IPX was basically an improved version of TCP/IP, and yes, they did cling to that idea a bit too long.

As far as ditching Netware, their flagship product that built the business, what exactly were they supposed to replace it with?

Re:TCO is everything (tech's not important)

[dwandy]

Why do you people keep insisting on looking at license costs!?
Ten bucks, forty bucks who cares?... c'mon! Clearly you only want to look at TCO, and I have several reports handy here ...err, somewhere, I'll find them - - and they all show that Microsoft has the lowest TCO!

TCO!

TCO!

...now go buy some Windows servers! Quick!

Re:Pricing is everything (tech better be good, too

[GooberToo]

Fedora Directory Server: About zilch.

That's absolutely false! The quote my company recently received was around $10,000+ for starters. That's a far cry from "zilch"! Given the size of the company it was to support, that price will place it as the most expensive option, on a per user basis! Your definition of "zilch" must be different from everyone else's.

Frightening

[FishandChips]

The financial figures are frightening. Novell booked $274.4 m in revenue, of which around $56 m was from open source products, of which around $13 m was pure Linux (the rest was Netware OES), of which only $10 m was from SuSE Linux ( a 22 per cent improvement). The article then quoted an analyst who said that Red Hat's Linux growth was twice as large and their revenue from Linux was five times larger.

Put it another way, a couple of years into their Linux story, Novell is turning over around $1 billion of which pure Linux contributes around $50 m, and much of the rest is declining legacy stuff. This is a drop in the ocean, and all the harder when Red Hat appear to be creaming Novell at the sharp end.

$50 m compared to $1 billion. I don't know how Novell is going to get out of this one, but talking about changes to SuSE or Ximian or yet more sugar-daddy spending on open source projects is like the Titanic and deckchairs. It's very hard to see Novell avoiding a break up.

Re:TCO is everything (tech's not important)

[dwandy]

I guess either me or the mods funny filter is off... maybe it was me.

Novell has 'Cool Solutions'!

[Anonymous Coward]

Identity Manager plug in for Eclipse is shiny...
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/dirxml/designe r/existinginstall_instructions.html

Product vs. Service

[C10H14N2]

Or it could be that their customers are sick of paying for service and maintenance contracts, ARE using SuSE, but have just downloaded it and wandered off giving Novell the finger. Before, you HAD to purchase licenses, maintenance or not. Now, you only have to purchase if you want service and support and I gather that the big players who are required to purchase those contracts aren't using SuSE and the others just see little benefit, so they just take the free stuff and leave.

training, poor compatibility, and instability

[russejl]

My company has been a Novell shop for long time and is finally giving in to Active Directory. :(

But here's my take on it. Maybe somebody at Novell will read this. The admins seem to be afraid to learn UNIX... So I am assuming that Novell charges for the training, the testing, etc. Now our admins, they get Winders but they really don't get Linux or UNIX. I think it would have been in Novell's best interest to eat the cost for training, especially to those who have already gotten their CNA or CNE in older Netware products. I think FUD and discomfort are major factors in hindering old Netware shops from going to Novell Linux.

Another issue that my company seems to hate about Netware (ver. 6.5) is its poor compatibility with Enterprise software and hardware. Netware clustering doesn't play well with Netbackup (it works, but it's very clunky). It also doesn't do well with SAN stuff... I really don't know what the issues are, but I've heard that expressed on more than one occasion. We do some Heirarchal Storage Management (HSM) (HSM essentially is a user transparent file archiving mechanism) which also is pretty klunky, esp. with Netbackup, etc. I have no idea if the Novell Linux works around these issues, but the FUD and discomfort of going to Linux don't help.

Netware 6.5 isn't all that stable. The servers ABEND fairly often. IMHO, they should have gotten off the DOS base a long time ago. I guess if we were running "workgroup" class Netware systems with less "enterprise" features, they'd be a bit more stable, but Netware needs work fairly well in a mid-level enterprise environment if it wants any real respect in from IT departments.

The old IBM adage, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM," seems to apply now to Microsoft.

But the training is probably the best thing they can do to keep the momentum. I think SUSE, although I haven't used it in a long time, and Linux in general, can and does operate well at the enterprise level, but for non UNIX people, it takes a lot of faith to trust in it.

But that's my two cents.

-Jim

Re:Talk to another rep

[gameguy1957]

You need to talk to another sales rep. I work at a high school with about 1100 users. Cost per user is $2.50 each. Unlimited servers, Zen for both the desktop and servers plus some other stuff I can't think of off the top of my head. Also got access to Suse when I have the time to install and test it.

-JM

Re:Frightening Numbers wrong

[eGuy]

Those numbers are 50 Million a quarter from linux. 1 billion a year total. So Novell makes about 200 million a year on Linux related products.

How Novell can Succeed

[Glamdrlng]

When Novell chose to throw all their eggs into the Linux basket, they took a huge risk. The problem is they didn't really throw all their eggs in it. Here, imho, is what Novell must do to succeed:

1. Give away Zen, or at least parts of it.
Many of the features in Zenworks come part and parcel with active directory. There could be a Zen-lite that does the same things that AD admins can do through group policy. Include the ability to do similar tasks on Linux machines and Novell can go back from "keeping up with Microsoft" to "staying a step ahead of Microsoft". While they're at it, Novell needs to work include support for every aspect of Firefox, including a list of supported plugins and extensions, to amke it manageable through Zen. AD admins can mange the IE settings across their network with GRoup Policy, Linux admins need to be able to do the same thing.

2. Do the same thing with Red Carpet.
Novell either needs to give Red Carpet away or have a limited version that operates the same way SUS does. They could have a professional version that will also use a push architecture in addition to a pull architecture. Personally, I loved Red Carpet when I first heard of it. Patch management for my windows machines and my Linux machines? Score. Here's the problem: I can get patch management on all my windows machines gratis with SUS / WSUS. I've got less than 20 Linux servers in my environment, about 200 windows servers, and around 3500 windows workstations. How could I possibly justify $18 per seat for Red Carpet when I can run SUS for free and just have our admins manually patch the Linux Servers? Yes I know Microsoft is the source of the vulnerabilities in the first place, yes I know Novell shouldn't have to give away a product that cleans up Microsoft's mess for free. Y'know what though, money talks. By having to pay extra cash for Linux patch management, that adds to the TCO of Linux while Windows' TCO stays the same, giving Microsoft marketing more ammo to work with.

3. Improve the Yast firewall interface and add remote management via Zen.
For that matter, everytinhg you can do in Yast needs to be accessible remotely via Zen. In an AD environment I can manage the Windows firewall on all the machines in my domain via Group Policy. I need to be able to do the same thing in a Linux environment. And the Yast firewall interface is the only one I've seen that actually sucks worse than the Windows firewall interface.

4. Ratchet up support for Wine. Partner with Codeweavers, or acquire them.
Novell's Linux support needs to embrace Wine or another emulator to assist with Linux migrations. Their current approach of "Run a Terminal Server that hosts the Windows-only application" isn't going to cut it. Users want icons on desktops that run their applications. Clicking an item on the linux desktop, then logging into a termserver, then clicking an icon on the termserver, then logging into an app, isn't going to fly. If Novell really wants to be successful in migrating companies to Linux, they should partner with or acquire one of the Windows emulation projects, and offer "take your POS custom app that you bought from a vendor or coded in house and make it work on Linux" as a service with a one time fee and optional support.

I think what Novell's trying to do is great, but I see them hanging themselves with it if they don't stay a step ahead of their competition.

Re:How Novell can Succeed

[Buelldozer]

On point number for you could use Citrix with your TS, integrate the TS into your Novell tree and then use the Citrix published application environment.

Logon to the network, click the pretty icon and BAM! there you are...running MS Outlook.

Spendy but very doable.

Good riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Novell did have an app server, it was called "Netware". Oracle ran on Netware.

Yeah, I was in an all-Netware house a while back. When I wanted to use a database (it would have made our in-house app much nicer), the Netware people kept saying "We have Oracle!", to justify their existence. Great, the most expensive database known to man -- that's going to be an easy sell for a small office.

Too bad there wasn't any other database. (That was a common symptom of Netware, actually: there's exactly one app to do any given task, so if it sucked, you were SOL.)

Pegasus mail did too.

Ah, I remember Pegasus mail. The only mail server I've seen that had its own client, and didn't speak any standard mail protocols (at least until relatively late in its life, IIRC). If it received a message with funny headers (spam, anyone?), it wouldn't remove a message from its queue, so it'd keep sending the same message over and over. Lots of fun. You know you're in trouble when the mail server for your platform is worse than Sendmail.

It was a lack of third party support, not a lack of a valid platform.

Part of building any platform is building third-party support. Microsoft practically gives away development tools. On Linux, they're included in most distributions. Have you ever tried to compile a program on Netware?

The developer docs came in hardcopy, covering maybe 6 feet of shelf (depending on release). I suppose they were complete, but they didn't make it easy to find what you're looking for. In theory, they had all this information on the web, too, but it was actually harder to search their web docs than to search the paper copy.

It's no surprise to me that their third-party support sucked.

Re:Frightening Numbers wrong

[FishandChips]

No, you are incorrect. That is what I originally thought. It is +/- 56 million a quarter from their open source stuff, but of that 43 million is the Open Enterprise Server Netware replacement stuff. Pure Linux is only 13 million of which they say SuSE and co is only 10 million. That is why the figures struck me as pretty scary and why they quoted that analyst saying Red Hat were five times ahead. At least, this is how I read the figures.

They have lost it!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I used to report bugs (and fixing) but no more!! To understand HOW lost they are look at : Annoying Bugs , the filesystem f_up is NOT a joke!! I was bitten BADLY!! Stupid of me to have an beta on my ordinary desktop, but I thought that since there was a late beta one could be safe... MAN .. the stuff they shoehorn into this late beta... god grief!! its like ... whats the name... eh "the so called belgian beer" (internal joke... hihi). Seriously.. I had "invested" my time in Suse.. and came to the conclusion that I better cut here... there is a saying (chinese??) "Don't throw good money after bad" s/money/time/ ... anyhow... sorry to spread FUD here but... PLS, take a good look at the open bugs before "investing" your time on this...

For me this is really sad, I don't "know" any other distro... I installed Mandriva on my wiped (thanks) box, so here we start from scratch again...

Re:Pricing is everything (tech better be good, too

[Clover_Kicker]

The guy mentioned K12, educational pricing can be a funny thing.

Re:Pricing is everything (tech better be good, too

[tulare]

*deploys cluebat* Installing FDS on Debian for how much money? Oh, right, zilch! If I had a dollar for ever time some idiot company or admin tried to buy his way out of a problem, I could own the company. If you guys seriously entertained that as a real possibility and it didn't occur to you that "Hey, it's GPL software, all of it, we can freaking rpm -i it ourselves" then I feel sorry for you. We have no money to buy a directory system, but guess what, that's OK!

Correction

[tulare]

Erm, perhaps it's not all GPL, but it is all under some version of a free license. Details here. Free (as in beer, etc) download of FDS (Binary RPMs for you redhatty folks!) right here. *puts away cluebat*

Re:Pricing is everything (tech better be good, too

[GooberToo]

*deploys cluebat back* Last I heard, the software was proprietary and is most certainly not GPL'd. Again, that's the last I heard. Besides, having an LDAP server in of its own, doesn't get you much. After all, OpenLDAP already exists. It's all the tools, templates, utilities, etc...that adds value.

*breaks cluebat* Next time, hit yourself a couple dozen times with it when you get the bright idea to use it. ;)

Validates Linux

[karearea]

Hmm, my guess is that it just validates Linux.

There is still the remains of the generation of network admin types that know Netware has the server OS to end all server OSs. As they see Novell adopting Linux, people start thinking ... hmm, Linux, if Novell is using it I should seriously look at it.

Now if Novell is using Linux, and I want to use Linux, do I have to use Novell's Linux. Ahh, I have the choice - I'll use Redhat, Ubuntu, Debian etc.

So to me it seems realistic to expect the numbers to be unbalanced - there is more choice in the linux market.

This was news in 1992

[billcopc]

It's funny but I never considered Novell to be a major player in anything. From the early 90's with DOS Netware, up to 2004 the last time I logged into a Novell network, there's always been an element of disdain in using Novell software, something bloaty, unpolished, baroque about it. On the surface it almost looks like a "networking for dummies" product, yet it's not.. or at least it doesn't try to be. They're trying to hold a seat in a market that is dominated by Windows on one side, Unix on the other.. in both situations it's TCP/IP and we don't need Novell's help.

Not all the news for Novell is bad!

[andy314159pi]

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/08/ 2046224

Re:Pricing is everything (tech better be good, too

[Anonymous Coward]

From Redhat, "Since the Admin Server and related files in this legacy package are not available as open source, please refer to the Licensing for these Binary packages." Clearly not everything is available as GPL nor Open Source. As the other guy said, next time, feel free to hit your self with your cluestick when you think you know something!

We'll let you know when you have an opinion you should express!

NetWare is not and does not run on DOS !!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we all please stop proliferating the urban legend that NetWare is or runs on DOS!!!!!!!!!!!

Back in the early days of NetWare, when hardware was very none standard, and they could not count on everything being the same. Novell needed to find a way to standardize on a boot method. What they decided to do was use DOS merely as a BOOT Loader, and not write their own. That's it, nothing more, nothing less. It is actually a clever solution that saved them tons of time and support problems by using something that already existed.

Ok, I am done now

Re:NetWare is not and does not run on DOS !!!!!!!

[NoelProf]

Keep in mind that to the layperson the term "DOS" is an alias for text mode. That's just the way it is.

Re:Pricing is everything (tech better be good, too

[tulare]

Oddly, you seem to have failed to read the link I provided, so here it is in plaintext: http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Licensing
Either which way, downloading and using for free is a long way away from five digits of USD. Sorry, your cluebat remains pristine.

Cheers.

Re:Pricing is everything (tech better be good, too

[GooberToo]

You completely missed the point. Which isn't exactly surprising.