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With OES 2.0, Novell Moves NetWare To Linux
apokryphos writes "Novell's long journey from NetWare to Linux is finally complete, with Open Enterprise Server 2.0. Linux-Watch takes a look at the newly-released OES 2.0: 'Now, with OES 2.0, the NetWare operating system kernel, NetWare 6.5 SP7, is still there if you run it, but it runs on top of the Xen hypervisor. You can also run the NetWare services, or a para-virtualized instance of NetWare, on top of Xen with the SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) 10 SP 1 kernel. So, if you're wedded to NetWare and its way of doing things, you don't have to wave good-bye to it.'"
Ummm, Netware was going strong long past Win 3.1. MS didn't really get their act together until Win2k. Even as just a file server, Netware was way ahead of windows with easy-to-manage folder-by-folder (if you want) ACLs. Heck, Netware 4 still plays nicely with Windows XP.
Also, any idea how much of a PITA it would be to migrate from Netware without having to re-do all file and user permissions? Yeah, there are tools, but I've never had much luck with them.
> Yes, DOS is still needed to boot NetWare.
.93 Linux kernel that started FOSS on its way.
Next thing you'll be telling me is that you need to boot Linux to get to VMWare ESX!! LOL, ROFL!!!!
> The problem is that Novell has (at best) remained a static target. Microsoft has been improving Windows. Linux has been improved. So now, there's really not much of a reason to run Novell's products IN A NEW DEPLOYMENT.
We like those old deployments, the ones that have been working since about '89. Oh yeah, they dropped IPX for IP, and got a life after eDirectory. Yawn.
> It seems to me that you can get pretty much everything NetWare gives you on a Windows network with some third-party management products, with the upshot that your platform is not obsolete.
Or, you could buy NetWare, say back in '89, with maybe some of that Zen stuff and have obviated the need for generations of patch work from Microsoft. Oh yeah, that was also before the
> Pretty much. Again, Novell has chosen to remain a fairly static target. Eventually, your competition will meet your feature set.
These wars have been going on for years. Has Novell kept up? Perhaps without the intense amount of FUD that its competition has needed to use.
> But remember, Novell makes more money from Microsoft (court cases, licensing deal) than it makes from sales of its products.
Cite your source. Novell shareholders will smile at you. And they'll also point out the number of jursidictions that they've successfully won in, much to the chagrin of Microsoft shareholders, who merely seek world domination.
It's an empty argument to say that Novell didn't win the war. You're probably to young to remember the Ring Zero wars, and how hilarious Windows NT 3.51 was, and how people tried in so many ways to make pre-Active Directory services work. Novell tried valiantly to out-brain Microsoft. They did it, but they couldn't out-MARKET Microsoft. There's a big difference. Want fries with that?
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Since then, the iFolder project has struggled, with people leaving, some wanting to rewrite the whole thing in C again (mono had some scalability issues), etc. Finally when they've managed to put in some of the features people have been wanting (multiple ifolder-servers, encryption etc), Novell in all its wisdom has decided again to make iFolder exclusive to OES2.
That's right: if you want to setup an iFolder server with the new 3.6 features, you need to buy OES2 at the premium price Novell is asking (and besides OES2 is full of other stuff many people don't want). So for Red Hat and any other distro, 3.4 is the latest version..
That's not entirely correct. You can download the iFolder 3.6 server from: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/dl9pf/. That is linked to from the iFolder site (www.ifolder.com). Now admittedly, I don't think there has been a whole lot of community involvement with iFolder 3, Novell has mostly been doing their own thing with it. But you can get source RPM's for iFolder 3.6 from the link above, along with RPM's for Fedora and OpenSuSE/SLES. They do need to do a better job of giving information to the community about what's going on with iFolder though. The website doesn't really have much on the new version - it seems like there are just occasional announcements out of the blue. There are also several different versions of iFolder mentioned on the site (3.2 - which came with OES 1, 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6). Hopefully Novell will do a little bit better job managing iFolder now that OES 2 was released. I love iFolder and use it a lot. It's great for people with laptops that need to have access to their files while off the network, but still want to have all of their files stored on a server to share with other people or run centralized backups, etc.
I briefly played around with OES 2 in VMware last night, and it doesn't seem too bad. I haven't been able to try out too many of the new features, but the installation was pretty smooth (especially in comparison to OES v1).
The good thing about what Novell is doing is that they are making Linux a viable option for a lot of midsized companies. RH or other distros work fine for small companies or large companies that have the technical people to make the glue to put everything together. But midsized companies need something more than RHEL/Fedora would provide out of the box, and may not have the expertise to put together a home built/3rd party solutions for directory services/groupware/web based file access/etc. You can certainly do those things with RHEL/Fedora, but not out of the box. With Novell (and MS, and maybe IBM & Sun too) you can get software to do all of that that works together without having to spend a lot of time putting together bits and pieces of software from different places.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
There is a good reason to keep netware on a network, if its already there, and its not just laziness or fear.
Actually, two things come to mind immediately - TCO, and the netware permissions.
From my experiences when I ran netware servers, a system could be thrown together for about $5-600 (thats hundreds,
not thousands...) that could serve directory services, files, and print jobs to 200 clients simultaneously without batting an eye, and do it nonstop for months. Its hard to get anything else to match those numbers for that little $$.
Though one of the true hallmarks of netware is the permissions set that it has, that I really haven't seen an equal to in anything else. IIRC, there were 8 different permissions that could be set in netware, as opposed to the 3 in *nix. It is particularly valuable if you want to use directory structure as part of your workflow - for example a user could have a directory where they could write, read, but not modify or delete. I ran this for a newspaper, and the utility of this should be quite apparent.
So just to answer it for all those people who are speculating why netware is still relevant - yes, it is. There are plenty of good reasons for people to keep it around. Though I'll admit it will likely become yet another good product killed by the micro$oft marketing machine.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
As a Windows system administrator, I'm getting a kick out of these replies.
There are, as I see it, some big problems with Windows:
1. You're much more likely to get an inexperienced boob running your network than you are with any other system out there. Most people I know (insert witty comment about "plural of anecdote != data", etc.) start off with Windows, then go to Linux or something else once they have their feet wet. Put another way, if you started off with NetWare, it's because you started off over ten years ago.
2. It's a royal pain in the rear to restore, especially if you're in a single server environment. Try restoring Active Directory on to a different machine - since it's wrapped up with System State, it's a crapshoot whether or not your new server will boot, much less have a working authentication system afterwards. I eagerly look forward to the day when I can restore Active Directory separately from the rest of my registry. With multiple servers, it's not quite so bad - you can get some redundancy going and migrate a new server in relatively cleanly. Exchange gets a little gnarly at times, though. Then again, when anything worth anything on Windows is a database (registry, Active Directory, Exchange, etc.), you're not going to be able to just "cp" your way out of your problems.
3. Windows Server is better than it used to be about requiring a reboot after an update, but Windows 2000 was horrible about it. If someone says they're rebooting their Windows 2000 server repeatedly throughout the year, it's telling me they're installing security patches and the like on a regular basis. If they're saying the same thing about Windows 2003, it probably means something similar, but the frequency is going down a little. Then again, rebooting a server is not that hard - do it after hours. Of course, it'd be handy if shutdown.exe actually worked the way it was supposed to so you could reliably script it... it seems to work 75% of the time for me, personally, which is about 25% worse than "shutdown -h now" works on my Ubuntu laptop.
4. Windows tries way too hard to be everything to everyone. It's built with the same mentality as Microsoft Word - yeah, you won't need 95% of the stuff that's there, but if MS did their job right, it'll be a different 95% for each customer. Trouble is, servers aren't word processors - when something goes wrong, you have to know about the other 95% and be able to troubleshoot it well enough to at least figure out if the problem is over there or if it's in the 5% you're actually using on a regular basis. Thankfully, a lot of that stuff is turned off by default, but if you've ever had to stare at group policy settings (especially pre-GPMC), well, you know what I'm talking about here.
Other than that, Windows is great!
The reason I greatly preferred WP5.1 was because it was not a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processor. Some of us actually liked the idea of What You Want Is What You Get. It might take alot longer to get used to a word processor where you can't just jiggle stuff about until it looks right but the rewards are far greater when you put in the practice.
The whole idea of a WYSIWYG text editor was a novel idea (no pun intended) but you only need to look at why no professional web dev uses dreamweaver in layout mode to understand why it is a failure in the long term. The results are sloppy. You end up with a document full of bloated markup that does not actually change what the page looks like, instead it just contains loads of elements that countermand each other.
eg: <B></B>some text<B></B>
Now most of the time this is just inefficient, but on some rare occasions it becomes an issue. When this happens you have a few choices:
1) Keep tidying up the document until you can make it look professional, unfortunately this can sometimes involve alot of tidying for very little reward.
2) Keep pushing stuff about in another WYSIWYG layout program until it looks right but is now even more inefficient that when you started (and hence harder for anyone else to work on). This still might take longer that expected (ie - quoted).
3) Bodge it and hope the client does not notice the minor layout issue you were unable to fix properly.
Since none of these are exactly ideal I would recommend thinking the choice through. I personally would recommend point 1, and since alot of companies are now crying out for websites where the code validates against W3C guidelines alot of companies obviously think the same way.
I know there are differences between an HTML page being as small and efficient as possible and a word document, but that doesn't change why I prefer WP over Word. WP allowed you to view and edit the markup directly more easily ten years ago than Word does today.
I dont read
Mods must be kids. The org post was a joke. They did sell a NetWare that ran under UNIX. It was their UNIX, called UNIXWare. It was ten + years ago. It was the product that got Norda ousted. Learn your history folks!
I've noticed a few fallacies in some of the comments that definitely need correcting. In general, people tend to combine arguments about Netware as an OS versus the services that have been bundled with it. Over the years Novell has been rather inept at developing , communicating, and executing a strategy on the inevitable migration from the Netware OS to something else. First they went through a period of simply supporting their services like eDirectory on Windows. Second, they acquired Suse and talked about parallel platforms with common services. Ultimately, it seems they made a rather smart decision in how they were going to continue to support their existing customer base that is utilizing Netware while giving a rather clear path to Linux. The problem Novell still has is that a lot of their services haven't been completely migrated to Linux yet.
1) eDirectory - Done. Has been multiplatform for years. Continues to be the single best meta directory repository on the market. There is not a single environment of any decent size that can get away with one directory to service all the business requirements, but eDirectory continues to be the best option for consolidating the directory data using Novell's Identity Manager suite of drivers and tools.
2) zenWorks - Pretty much anyone who has used it considers it the premiere tool for managing Windows clients. Only in the next release will they not require Netware for some of the components. The middle tier design and agent-based client make it a pleasure to work with compared to the fat Novell Client days.
3) Management tools - someone else already said it, but Novell cannot seem to stay focused (and enforce discipline on their own development teams) to provide a consistent management tool. They have gone from NWAdmin to ConsoleOne to iManager - except you still pretty much need each of them depending on what you are going to manage.
4) File permissions - The NSS file system is pretty damn good, has been ported and made available on Linux for a few years now. It still provides the leading access controls / inherited rights / filtered rights that other file systems should be ashamed of for not offering.
For sure, Novell is just as if not more screwed up than any other company. They have squandered many opportunities to reestablish themselves as a significant technology player, but they are hardly on the verge of going out of business. They are profitable and still growing as a company. Product lines die out and Netware has been dying out for years, but they are considerably more than Netware.
Unixware was NOT Netware under Unix, it was Unix Sys V R4.2. Netware for Unix was a product sold by Novell before they even acquired Unix from USL well.. http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/unixware/general/ Anyway, know your history :-) good advise indeed