Novell Cancels BrainShare Conference

A.B. VerHausen writes "While OSCON and SCALE organizers ramp up plans for their events, Novell shuts down BrainShare after 20 years, citing travel costs and budget tightening as main concerns. 'Instead of the traditional in-person conference, Novell plans to offer online classes and virtual conferences to make education and training available to more people at a lower per-head cost to companies,' says the news story on OStatic.com."

Comments

Re:Huh?

[Gr33nNight]

We have a Novell backend, and use Groupwise and Zenworks. We do not use NetBEUI or IPX/SPX.

Re:IPX was actually a very nice protocol

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Instead of statically allocated local addresses or DHCP servers, IPX use the 48-bit MAC address as the only local identifier. IPX and IP both use 32-bit external addresses, but the IPX 32-bit address is simply the address of the network, with no addressing mask to split it into net/host parts. This meant that clients could be plugged in anywhere and just worked, without any DHCP servers, and since each Netware server was allocated its own internal 32-bit network address, it was trivial to install multiple network cards for load balancing and/or redundancy

Yup. And now there's a push for IPv6. Automatic address assignment on IPv6 turns the 48-bit MAC address into a portion of the IPv6 address. It's startlingly similar to IPX. If the Internet had been based on IPX, and they figured out a way to make IPX run at a global scale (finding equivalents to things like BGP) we wouldn't be in the impending address exhaustion pickle we are today.