Novell Completes Sale

symbolset writes "Today Novell completed its sale to Attachmate. The company will be a wholly owned subsidiary and be delisted from the stock exchange. Novell was once a dominant player in network software, and its passing signals the end of an era."

Comments

No good?

[spudnic]

So my 3.12 CNE is no good any more? Dang!

Re:No good?

[peragrin]

well it probably runs just fine.

I know I have a complete install of 3.12 and manuals around work some where. the hard part is getting it to work with windows XP.

Re:No good?

[Holi]

Wooooooosh.

A CNE is a certification for Novell (Certified Novell Engineer.)

and you have know idea how many I knew that couldn't do squat.

Re:No good?

[black6host]

I did a lot of work with Novell back in the 3.x days and it was a workhorse. When Microsoft first decided to try and penetrate the server market NT was a joke. I won't say that current MS server products are not good, in some cases they are. In my opinion, what really killed Novell and boosted Microsoft was that anyone and their brother could write server side code for Windows (not that it means it was good code, just much easier to do.) You had to be pretty good to write server side Novell code. So business who needed a server side app would go with cheap and available.

Then, essential apps started to appear that were only written for Windows. So even if you ran Novell you had to have a Windows server to handle the database or whatever. I saw it countless times and it worked in MS's favor. Finally folks just said why run two different server OSs? About that time Windows Server 2000 was out and it wasn't nearly as bad as the versions before. Trust me, I loved Novell. Rock solid. But it could only be that way in a manner that prevented every Tom, Dick and Harry from writing the next greatest customer management system. No winning IDEs like Delphi or, shudder, VB and Access so easily accessible. (Or other MS development languages.) MS made it easy to write code for the server. Note: I didn't say good code. And those apps sold. And they sold Windows along with it.

Re:No good?

[cusco]

Place that I worked in the late '90s was partly Novell 3.12 and partly NT 4.0, and I noticed two things almost immediately. First, the Windows side was **MUCH** easier to manage than the Novell side, especially the centralized user management. Second, Novell saddled its customers with IPX/SPX and wouldn't support TCP/IP for quite a long time, which made accessing the Internet from within your network operating system annoyingly difficult. On the other hand, we had to reboot the NT servers every two or three months while the Novell servers only needed reboots about once a year.

Novell 4 was a great product, but it was about a year too late and the upgrade was FAR too expensive for most of their customers. Microsoft realized early on that 'good enough' really was good enough for most of their customers. Novell wanted to take the time and do their LDAP implementation correctly, and customers didn't want to wait for centralized management. Then in one of the dumbest pricing schemes I've ever seen, at the beginning it actually cost more to upgrade from 3.12 to 4 than it cost to install from scratch. Pissed off an awful lot of admin.

Re:No good?

[Anonymous Coward]

So my 3.12 CNE is no good any more? Dang!

There you have the answer in your replys. The meaning of CNE is already forgotten :)

Re:No good?

[torgis]

Place that I worked in the late '90s was partly Novell 3.12 and partly NT 4.0, and I noticed two things almost immediately. First, the Windows side was **MUCH** easier to manage than the Novell side, especially the centralized user management. Second, Novell saddled its customers with IPX/SPX and wouldn't support TCP/IP for quite a long time, which made accessing the Internet from within your network operating system annoyingly difficult. On the other hand, we had to reboot the NT servers every two or three months while the Novell servers only needed reboots about once a year.

This. You just summed up my sysadmin experience from late 1996 until early 2000, which I switched jobs for greener pastures. I haven't seen a Novell server or a Groupwise inbox since then. Can't say I miss it much either.

oblig dune reference

[Anonymous Coward]

May its passing cleanse the world.

So what will happen to OpenSuse?

[kalpol]

I am fond of that distribution - any word on whether it will still be maintained?

Re:So what will happen to OpenSuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Attachmate have stated that there will be no change in the relationship between SUSE and OpenSUSE

http://www.attachmate.com/Press/PressReleases/nov-22-2010-SUSE.htm

Re:So what will happen to OpenSuse?

[sudden.zero]

It looks like they will continue maintaining SUSE according to their website http://www.attachmategroup.com/ . It also looks like they are going to continue using the Novell name. Both the Suse and Novell logos are on their site.

Re:So what will happen to OpenSuse?

[malignant_minded]

looks like opensuse just did a news release yesterday about 11.4 and I don't see anything about it saying goodbye http://news.opensuse.org/2011/04/26/opensuse-11-4-dvds-for-events/

Re:So what will happen to OpenSuse?

[SpooForBrains]

(fantasy hat on) Can we have SuSE back as an independent German company again please? It is a shadow of its former self.

Re:So what will happen to OpenSuse?

[malignant_minded]

ok this is not directed at the parent but what part of this statement is insightful? Is saying that you are fond of a distro insightful? or is asking a question that can be researched insightful?

Re:So what will happen to OpenSuse?

[Xtifr]

Indeed, given that Suse was reportedly one of Novell's main profit centers, it seems unlikely that it or OpenSuse is in any danger of disappearing. In fact, it looks like Suse may be becoming a separate subsidiary of Attachmate, independent of the former Novell

Re:So what will happen to OpenSuse?

[arth1]

I wish. 7.2 was the last version I really liked.

Re:So what will happen to OpenSuse?

[Yaos]

How can you be fond of a distribution that's supposedly open but the only distribution that can run Novell software? It's just as proprietary as Windows.

Re:So what will happen to OpenSuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a fantasy. SuSE will become its own subsidiary of Attachmate and will be run by a German CEO and headquartered in Germany. /source: Novell Employee

Final Abend

[nbvb]

UNLOAD NOVELL.NLM

System halted Wednesday, April 27, 2011 4:30:00 pm EDT

  Abend: Page Fault Processor Exception (Error code 00000002)
          OS version: Novell NetWare 4.10 November 8, 1994
        Running Process: SCRSAVER.NLM
          Stack: AC 1F 65 01 E7 66 03 F1 50 CA 65 01 03 00 00 00
                          D0 1F 65 01 09 00 00 00 B0 81 01 F9 54 CE 65 01
                        39 67 03 F1 0B CB 65 01 B4 D0 65 01 B0 81 01 F9
    Press "Y" to copy diagnostic image to disk.
    Otherwise press "X" to exit.

Re:Final Abend

[jd]

Congratulations! You have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands! (Unbelievable, isn't it?)

Re:Final Abend

[Linker3000]

Move over Richard Keil - this is a true memorial abend!

(for those too young: http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/memorial.shtml)

Corel Wordperfect is still around

[Toe, The]

Reading this, I kinda wondered what ever became of Wordperfect, once a dominant player in the business world (along with Lotus 123), before Microsoft, well, Microsofted them.

Now I remember, Corel bought Wordperfect, and apparently it's still around.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[Desler]

Word Perfect killed itself by being so late in bringing out a Windows version that by the time they did they were irrelevant to anyone but lawyers still using DOS.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[RatBastard]

That and the version they did come out with, 5.2 for Windows, was crap. By the time they did come out with a good version it was way too late.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[iplayfast]

Wasn't there a problem with WordPerfect working with windows due to api details being withheld?

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[Richard_at_work]

Thats the common folklore myth, but theres little grounding to it - the issues WordPerfect 5.1 (the first Windows version) was down to a poorly adaptable architecture internally and the fact that Windows superseded most of the advantages that WordPerfect had enjoyed up until then (a consistent internal character set which meant that WordPerfect 5.1 couldn't handle all of the languages that Windows did, and the fact that Windows entirely replaced the print subsystem that WordPerfect had used up until then, making its extensive print driver collection worthless).

Sure, like Netscape, Microsoft had a hand in its death, but the real story, again just like Netscape, was that the product lost its competitive edge and fell by the way side.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[Chris Mattern]

Here, let me Google that for you:

http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1208530087126?trkid=NASEMGglOP#tabview=tab2

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[guruevi]

That's indeed part of the problem. MS used secret API's in Word that made it work much faster (you know, back in the day when everything was optimized in order to be able to run acceptably) than WordPerfect. It also happened that if you installed a version of Word, WordPerfect would start crashing because of a missing or replaced DLL.

But WordPerfect was not without fault either, they made mistakes marketing, they made mistakes programming, they basically pulled a Vista. They had (and still have) a much better word processor than Word and it's continuing to be used although they're not the cash cow they once were.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[rudy_wayne]

Reading this, I kinda wondered what ever became of Wordperfect, once a dominant player in the business world (along with Lotus 123), before Microsoft, well, Microsofted them.

Now I remember, Corel bought Wordperfect, and apparently it's still around.

Microsoft really had nothing to do with Wordperfect's death. They were far and away the number one DOS word processor and felt they could ignore that newfangled Windows thing that came along. By the time they realized that Windows wasn't a passing fad, it was too late. And it didn't help that their intial Windows versions were crap.

Novell bought Wordperfect for $800 Million and just a couple of years later sold it to Corel for $200 Million. Then a few years later Corel (the entire company) was sold for $200 million.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[LordLimecat]

Windows version that by the time they did they were irrelevant to anyone but lawyers still using DOS.

HAH, our clients have some of those, and they dont use DOS.

Have you ever tried to get 16 year old software to run on windows 7? Its a lot of fun.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember the Corel/Wordperfect suite written totally in Java? It was slow, buggy, and well, it just sucked.

Happened back in the 90's when everyone thought Java was going to rule the world (that is until they actually tried to use it).

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[Desler]

That's indeed part of the problem.

No, that wasn't part of the problem at all. That's just crap made up after the fact by people plagued with nostalgia who can't possibly fathom that Microsoft could haven't beaten WordPerfect by anything but sneak moves.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no evidence that WordPerfect was in any way hindered by lack of access to secret APIs. I've used WP 5.1 and it didn't run particularly slowly. But stability was a big issue. WP 5.1 had a tendency of dereferencing null pointers and re-accessing previously freed memory, which given the nature of Windows 3.1 generally meant that it was time for a reboot.
In addition to that, there was also a sense of too little, too late. I used WP for Windows because I had used the DOS version before, but many people I knew went with Word because it shipped earlier, and too be honest, even though I hate to admit it, it was a better word processor too, it wasn't just more user-friendly but had more useful features as well.
And WP never really progressed. (To give an example of how bad the situation is: 2011 and still no Unicode support.)

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[Xross_Ied]

In the Win3.x and Win9x and NT4 days I built and maintained computers labs at a community college.

For Win3.x, WP5.x and 6.x shipped with a msvrt.dll and one other MS provided DLL that was identical binary (and version number) to what was shipped with Windows itself. The WordPerfect installer replaced the Windows installed copy with it's own copy where the timestamp was the only difference.

As soon as you installed MS-Office these two DLLs (in the windows directory) were replaced with different binaries which reported the same version number.

Once installed, WordPerfect would be slower and more crash prone.

I don't know if this was a planned/malicious change on the part of Microsoft or just crappy version control development, you decide.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[Vancorps]

Do it all the time, easy as hell with Virtual Box.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[inode_buddha]

Um, some of us were actually around when it was all happening, some of us can read court documents, and some of us have *long* memories.

I call astroturf.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[inode_buddha]

There is plenty of evidence and in fact a court case or two. Dig back through the archives at Groklaw sometime, it's a real education.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[plover]

That was ordinary, garden variety, DLL-hell. Every Windows app suffered from it. Microsoft simply understood the details of how to leverage it to make sure their apps weren't on the receiving end of the fail stick.

Microsoft's version control universally sucked. Windows installers sucked even harder. Everyone suffered from that crappy architecture, including the competitors to Word.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[owlstead]

Hmm, I think MS was completely behaving badly at the time (and probably still are, I won't buy any Nokia stock), but I can remember a nice demo of WP on Windows that took down the whole machine (this *was* the pre-NT time we're talking about) during a large presentation. I don't know what they were trying to pull, but they were late to the party and the initial implementation was rather crap.

I never really liked WP - I especially loathed it's menu structure, but I don't hate it as much as I loathe Word right now. I've got 8 A4 (~letter) pages of defects and counting. I am totally accustomed to not scroll fast or it will crash.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[LordLimecat]

Great. Now teach a 60+ year old lobbyist, who is too resistant to change to switch off of WordPerfect 5.2 to something less dated, how to fire up a VBox session, log into this machine-within-a-machine, how to share files between them, etc etc etc. Im sure he will grasp it all perfectly.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[IceNinjaNine]

Have you tried something like VMware ThinApp? I think they still offer a free demo.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[Hydian]

Actually, it was crap going on at the time surrounding several products and not just WordPerfect. The worst part wasn't that Microsoft was using undocumented APIs for an advantage, but that if someone else started to use them, Microsoft would remove those APIs to break their software. It's been a long time, so I don't recall all of the different packages that ran into issues, but it happened several times.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[rbrander]

I don't try to teach resistant people anything. They're resistant, so it's frustrating. I find that if I leave them to their own devices (literally) for even a short time, they become less resistant. Or they figure it out. Either way, my stress remains low.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[Vancorps]

I've done almost exactly that actually. I created a drive mapping and told him to just use drive d for his documents. It was actually fairly easy, since it's DOS there is no logging into a machine within a machine, you just hit the big play button and then you're in your legacy app provided you autostarted with a good old fashioned autoexec.bat file. There's then nothing him him to really grasp then.

Of course if they are resistant to change then they probably aren't worth going through too much hassle for. For me, I did it as an intellectual exercise as I was used to network scripting because of my Netware admin days with IBM EduQuest machines. It comes back pretty quick, especially since these days you can just Google it.

Re:Corel Wordperfect is still around

[Anonymous Coward]

So Microsoft never had anything to do with Wordperfect.
Windows killed WP. MS made Windows.
Windows WordPerfect versions were crap, mostly due to the lack of available documentation for the new system, and the new libraries. MS Office had system libraries written with them in mind, and not all of them were available for other developers.

Memories

[Compaqt]

Netware
Utah
WordPerfect
QuattroPro
Digital Research
DR-DOS
Simian GNOME
Suse
USL
UNIX
SCO
patents
Mono

Re:Memories

[Stormwatch]

Burma shave.

Re:Memories

[slack_justyb]

Why do I find myself wanting to follow that up with, "we didn't start the fire..."?

Re:Memories

[justthinkit]

Joe Doupnik, Hall of Famer.

Nobody worked harder to assist other people on the Novell mailing list. About as selfless and brilliant as anyone you will ever meet. And even wilder looking in person.

Re:Memories

[n7ytd]

And a fantastic professor, if you were a motivated student. I had networking and Linux device drivers coursework by Dr. Doupnik as a grad. student and enjoyed it immensely. I was puzzled why so many other students had troubles with his teaching style, until I realized they were mostly frustrated by his refusal to spoon feed them answers rather than demand they seek knowledge on their own.

Sic semper Microsoft particeps

[straponego]

(I'm sure that's bad Latin)

Re:Sic semper Microsoft particeps

[jd]

ad perpetuam memoriam, Novell, cor aut mors

not the least bit surprising

[v1]

Just another example of innovate or die. They had a HUGE place in business servers years ago, and then they just sat down on their laurels, and never stood back up.

Was there even anything worth acquiring in this sale? even the name brings a musty smell to a conversation.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Just another example of innovate or die. They had a HUGE place in business servers years ago, and then they just sat down on their laurels, and never stood back up.

No, their prices were being undercut by Microsoft, which had independent revenue stream in the form of MsOffice and Windows. It is impossible for any company to fight this in their own turf. Microsoft will simply wait for you to run out of cash and then sweep in and peck on the carcass.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[countertrolling]

Was there even anything worth acquiring in this sale?

There was, but hopefully we dodged a bullet

Re:not the least bit surprising

[crasshacker]

Really? Novell has been around almost 30 years, so I suspect that they bring more than a musty smell to a conversation - unless those involved in the conversation believe that they've built no new products since the early days of NetWare. In any case, I hope they continue going strong. I love Mono, and I love SUSE Linux. (I also happen to work for a business unit with the same parent company, The Attachmate Group, so I may be a bit biased. :-))

Re:not the least bit surprising

[osu-neko]

Indeed. Novell isn't going away. They just have new owners.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

The perception at the time was that the NT GUI interface was much less intimidating than the (cryptic) command line management of Novell's product. Regardless of whether the perception was true in fact, it was certainly true in the hearts and minds of the minimally to moderately skilled LAN "administrator" of the time. The simple truth is that the command line interface intimidated small business implementors during the computerization of small business America.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Just another example of innovate or die. They had a HUGE place in business servers years ago, and then they just sat down on their laurels, and never stood back up.

No, their prices were being undercut by Microsoft, which had independent revenue stream in the form of MsOffice and Windows. It is impossible for any company to fight this in their own turf. Microsoft will simply wait for you to run out of cash and then sweep in and peck on the carcass.

Yep, it's just like Microsoft did to Google. Remember when we all used to use Google for searching and now we all use Bing? Sad really. There is truly no way to stop the all powerful Microsoft. No point in blaming the poor businesses for their lack of innovation or execution because we all know that no matter how good you are, Microsoft will win.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[geekoid]

No, there network stack was horrid, and they where late to tcp/ip. trying to force IPX to be the de facto standard.

Novell was under cutting MS, not the other way around. They moved very expensive net cards at cost, and if pressed they would give you netware.

Novell could not handle large business and large business number of users. In a desperate attempt to deal with this they bought Unix. Instead of improving their design.

By the 90s MS TCP/IP implementation was starting to blow Novell IPX out of the water,a nd then Novell stumbled with there implementation.

Seriously people, MS was the small player at that time.

Then they made the mistake of deciding to compete with MS in the Office dept. WordPerfect was a big mistake.

When this happened Novell was the big player, MS was small time.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[Holi]

Ahh but the days of bindery hacking were fun.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick question: ConsoleOne, NetAdmin or NWadmin? Don't know? Right--no centralized administration and constantly changing rules on which administration was handled.

And face it: Microsoft built a server environment which, with little modification, could use many applications. Novell never had that luxury for their servers.

But the ultimate problem was this: If I were to start a company, why pay extra for Novell when Microsoft already provided all of the network needs which I desire? Furthermore, most developers never managed to create their apps for Novell, but they worked just fine on Microsoft software. It doesn't matter how or why, as a business owner, I just care that I get the most results for my money.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously people, MS was the small player at that time.

This is a strange version of history.

Microsoft was not a small player when they released NT. They were a small player in enterprise networking, but not a small player in IT. NT did very poorly in the server market against Netware, and even against the likes of Banyan early on. But the Microsoft name and the Windows branding gave it huge name recognition even if it had a small market share. It was hugely hyped and anticipated as early as 1990. It was officially released in 1993.

The internet swept the world shortly after this and changed the role of network server. Until 1994, servers were "file servers" and or "print servers" or maybe "email servers" and faced inside a company, allowing employees to share resources. With the internet wave, servers became web servers and app servers, that faced out to the public, then they became intranet servers, too, facing back into the company.

By 1995, MS was a significant player in network servers, and scrambling to get on top of this whole internet thing. Novell was also scrambling to adapt to the internet phenomenon. Windows never had excelled at file and print serving. It was a much better app platform. Novell struggled to strengthen their app platform. And Unix surged through the roof. I personally think that Linux did more to displace Netware than did Windows.

By Windows 2000, MS finally developed and released Active Directory, and could at last offer something in the same universe as Netware's directory services. It could also offer an application platform more similar to the Unix/BSD/Linux model that dominated the internet. It also offered IIS, etc. At this point it was a major player in the network server market.

Meanwhile, Novell gambled on Linux. It was a huge move. Stunning in a way. And in many ways it was brilliant. But Novell couldn't transition from the file server company of the 80's to the Redhat competitor of the 2000's. Or at least it couldn't before management gave up and partnered with MS, then sold to Attachmate. In 15 years, they never found the path back to the top. They could compete well against Banyan. They competed remarkably well against MS. But they didn't figure out how to be dominant against MS and Linux. And they couldn't figure out the Apple way to make loads of money and prestige without being dominant.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

IPX was and is better than TCPIP in every way. How you characterise it as "horrid" I can't imagine. The last possible cause of Novell's demise was their dedication to a superior technology. I have my thoughts on what actually caused it but I'm not free to share them.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[The End Of Days]

Have you noticed how the tech world has evolved to cope with Microsoft? So things worked out in the end, and the bitterness is useless because you can't turn back time.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[cusco]

Most companies could handle rebooting their servers every month or two, and by buying a Windows server you automatically got all the network services most companies needed. If you couldn't handle any downtime you bought Novell or DEC or AIX, but for the majority of businesses Windows was adequate. And the tools made all the difference in the world. We needed my CNE boss to manage the Novell side of our network, but I, just an MCP with very little experience, could handle the Windows side.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[wrook]

One place they had some business was in migrating businesses from Netware to Linux. I once talked to a salesman about their Linux business trying to understand how they were going to make money. His answer was that they would offer user hand-holding support, but no custom development contracts. They were intent on offering free tools to make it attractive to move away from Netware and Novell intended to basically charge for the service doing that. But they seemed to have no plan what so ever about how to make money once their customers were on Linux. It seemed to me that it was merely a question of time before they packed it in.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[JohnnyDoh]

You're talking out of your ass. Novell were selling OES, their former NetWare services (iPrint, eDirectory, NSS, clustering) running on top of SLES. And even SLES itself was not free. Just like RHEL, you had to pay for a subscription to download the patches and updates.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention a bug in the TCP/IP stack in netware 5.2 where a certain counter would not reset itself as it should have and would stop accepting new connections and required a reboot to fix. Said bug went unpatched for a LONG time, and then when they did fix it, they broke tcp/ip in a different way. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice Windows 2000 here we come!

Re:not the least bit surprising

[Hydian]

It started even earlier than that. Microsoft had a guaranteed revenue stream from MS-DOS. Funnily enough, Novell was in a position at one time to cripple Microsoft by killing off their main source of revenue, but they never pulled the trigger and did it. Right about when MS-DOS 6 was released, Novell owned DR-DOS which was a superior version of DOS. DR-DOS didn't mean much of anything to Novell, certainly not to their bottom line. Had they given it away, sales of MS-DOS would have plummeted and Microsoft would have lost a huge chunk of their revenue just as they were releasing Windows NT. It would have been a tough blow to recover from, especially since Windows 95 was still two years out and their Office products were still fighting an uphill battle yet.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[n7ytd]

As Windows 95 and later versions started shipping with working network stacks built in, it became harder to justify purchasing and maintaining NetWare in addition to the network that came with the OS "for free".

Re:not the least bit surprising

[n7ytd]

This. As someone not keeping track too closely, it really seemed to me like they realized just a bit too late that the cash cow (NetWare) was being butchered by Windows.

For a small shop, yes, NetWare was technically leaps and bounds more capable than Windows' server offerings, but it required cluefulness to maintain, and Windows was often "good enough" that blind monkeys could kind of get it working. As hardware got better, the deficiencies of Windows were hidden more easily. Windows also being able to natively talk to NetWare servers made it too easy to run in a mixed environment and then migrate away from the old NetWare servers at leisure.

The move to Linux seemed like a last ditch effort to keep a horse--any horse-- in the server race. But for that same small shop, my options became:

• 1. Use the networking that comes included with my Windows licenses.
• 2. Fiddle with Linux for free.
• 3. Continue to pay for NetWare to replace option 1.
• 4. Start to pay Novell to do option 2 for me.

Re:not the least bit surprising

[JohnnyDoh]

Are you saying Windows Server CALs were free? And what, exactly, would you have continued to pay for NetWare? Unless you upgraded to a new version or added another server you wouldn't have had to spend a dime if you already owned the licenses...

Re:not the least bit surprising

[n7ytd]

Maybe my definition of "small shop" is much smaller that yours. I'm thinking the type of place where a desktop machine in the corner that can share out a couple of hard drives and maybe a printer with a Windows 95 license as being "good enough".

I'm the owner of a 50 person company in 1997 with a NetWare server that is so reliable I forget all about it, except when I write checks to the guy I have come in for 6 hours a week to do the backups or to install another $300 NetWare-approved NIC when I get a new desktop. The Microsoft advertisements in PC Magazine are telling me that Windows 95 can solve all my problems, and it looks like I can get network cards for $150 from the local computer store and have the receptionist's desktop host our file share. She doesn't use her machine much anyway, and can probably do the backups too if I hook up a tape drive to that machine and show her what icon to click every Friday afternoon. I also read on AOL that if I change a registry setting in NT, I can get around the server connection limit for free. As my office starts to add a printer here or there or when I get a bigger hard drive in the next desktop I can just share them out. Soon the power supply fan in my 5 year old NetWare server starts making noise, and I realize that if I copy off all the files on that machine to other places on the network we can just unplug it, stop paying the backup guy, and not look back.

No, not an ideal situation and a mess to maintain, but I saw this happen over and over again in small companies.

So Long Novell

[Quato]

I'll fondly remember our Novell 3.x server that we didn't reboot for two years. We replaced it with about four NT servers that needed constant attention.

Re:So Long Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

I also remember Novell 4.0, which wouldn't boot at all...

Re:So Long Novell

[Hazel Bergeron]

Why did you replace?
Why didn't you revert to Netware?

Re:So Long Novell

[Wyatt Earp]

I worked in a 4.11 shop, it worked just fine, years of uptime. Groupwise had some problems, the migration to 5 was nightmarish.

I really think IPX instead of IP was a mistake after 1995 though.

Re:So Long Novell

[bratloaf]

I recently got called in by a client to "help out a relative with their server". A smallish family business at least three generations deep (selling and maintaining farm equipment). When I arrived I was greeted with a lot of questions - about if I could possibly help them move their office to a smaller space down the road. They were very concerned about their server, because a bigger local consulting company had told them it would cost $4000 to move it to a new office.

I took a look, and found a pristine (c) 1992 DEC server (x86) running Netware 3.1 with two software mirrored SCSI drives. 10-base-T, and an old "concentrator". Heheh...

Workstations were IBM PCs (the old style) with Novell ethernet network cards.

I backed up their entire server (SYS vol and DATA vol) to my FLASH DRIVE. Did some testing offline to be sure their (c)1994 accounting software could be made to run independently of the server if needed, and moved their stuff the next weekend. The server had been up for 2664 days. Uneventful move. Server is still up. We plan to replace it with a small SAN sometime this summer. That thing had been running 24/7 with only a few reboots due to power loss since 1992. This just happened a month or two ago. (And no, no one had ever applied the Y2K fixes to it...)

Crazy reliable.

Re:So Long Novell

[Quato]

Why did you replace?
Why didn't you revert to Netware?

The word came down from management that Exchange/Outlook was going to be the way of the future. So we needed a domain server, a Exchange server and a couple of file servers. Of course our Novell server did this all in one machine, and did it a hell of a lot faster.
Novell didn't go out of style because of poor design, it went out of style because Microsoft put more advertising out and convinced more users in upper management that it was the best thing out there.
All of a sudden there was this if it isn't 'Windows on Intel it's crap mentatlity' that made Microsoft what it is.

Re:So Long Novell

[man_of_mr_e]

It's hard to believe that the hardware kept working for 19 years, particularly the hard drives, but just as surprising the power supply (which tends to suck in so much dust and lint that they eventually die from overheating). The cooling fans also tend to give up the ghost after about 5 years as well.

I'm more interested in how you backed up the server to USB when all of the computers were made before USB ports existed.

Re:So Long Novell

[peragrin]

i did something similar 3 years ago. the netware 3.1 server just never died. when we los tpower and rebooted you had to reset the clock as the calendar was fine software wise but the hardware bios wouldn't set right upon boot.

However the company closed/sold out and i made two copies of their SYS and DATA vol each one to a separate computer. all i had to due was flip a couple of settings and redirect some file pointers and the server became two separate computers with all data intact.

One of those has since died(unlucky lighting strike) the other is in an old HP laptop that only boots off of the power cable and isn't hooked up.

Re:So Long Novell

[Quato]

He probably just plugged a laptop into the ethernet, mapped drives and copied to his flashdrive.

Re:So Long Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps:
*A Windows-based PC with Netware connected to the same network
*A CompactFlash card with an IDE adapter
Either way, quite a feat.

Re:So Long Novell

[HuguesT]

1992 hardware did not require as much cooling as it does now.

Re:So Long Novell

[geekoid]

I wonder if he realizes the 4k to get a company to do that is a fair price?

But hey, things are cheap if you don't value tome or accountability.

Re:So Long Novell

[geekoid]

"Novell didn't go out of style because of poor design,"

HAHAHAHAhahaha... oh my. *wipestearfromeye*.

That's rich.

Re:So Long Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

Once again, the power of legacy American fabrication and programming trumps all the modern crud. Why do people consider it to be "modern" when they have less technologies to move data around?

Best version of Microsoft Windows was 3.51 when it was maintained by DEC whom made it a chimera OpenVMS with Microsoft Windows ontop, but that changed with NT 4 and the rest is history.

Re:So Long Novell

[man_of_mr_e]

While that's true of CPU components, it's not true of things like Power Supplies which expend a great deal of heat. Older computers drew a lot of electricity as well. 1992 hardware was likely a 486 of some sort, possibly clock doubled or tripled (which ran a bit hotter as well).

Re:So Long Novell

[HornWumpus]

You haven't lived until you genned sys on netmare* 2 with only floppys. Better get it right the first time.

Once you got the first server up you copied the floppy images onto the bastard but there was no avoiding that feed at least once. What possible reason could there be for an installer to need the floppys that many times? I carried a server with me to do installs after once.

I think a large part of Netwares demise was CNE. Theoretically, they wouldn't even sell you a license unless you were in 'the club'. Novell basically saw CNE as a franchise and 'license to steal' early on. My cost on grey market was less then his cost at local dealer (Novell alphabet soup.) We knew each other.

*IMHO if version =5 netmare else netware

Re:So Long Novell

[HornWumpus]

Slash code ate my less then 3 or greater then or equal to 5 * comment.

Re:So Long Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

There was no "Novell 4.0". Novell is the name of the company (and yes, *is* is the correct word, as Novell continues to operate as a business unit with its own identity as part of Attachmate). NetWare was the name of the product I suspect you are referring to.

Novell is more than NetWare. A lot of people still don't seem to get that. With several hundred products, Novell is a *lot* more than just NetWare.

Re:So Long Novell

[cusco]

That's DEC hardware for you. Helped move a PDP-11 a few years ago which literally hadn't been turned off or rebooted since some time in the 1990s.

Re:So Long Novell

[cbope]

I ran Novell servers on generic PC hardware (i386 cpu's with 16MB RAM) in the early 90's, starting with 3.11 and then migrating to 4.1 some time later. They were crazy reliable, going easily 1000 days or more between reboots. When the company I was working for moved to another state and I chose to stay behind, the new local guy they hired didn't know Novell so it was replaced with NT 4.0. Damn servers had to be rebooted almost daily to keep them working properly. Server maintenance went from being a side-task done by myself while I concentrated on other things to being a full time job for one IT guy. Gotta love progress.

Re:So Long Novell

[Damnshock]

It's hard to believe that the hardware kept working for 19 years, particularly the hard drives, but just as surprising the power supply (which tends to suck in so much dust and lint that they eventually die from overheating). The cooling fans also tend to give up the ghost after about 5 years as well.

I'm more interested in how you backed up the server to USB when all of the computers were made before USB ports existed.

You'd be surprised of how robust things were 20-25 years ago. I had to check the server on a small health care center in my home town and it was a simple i386 that had been running non-stop for *several* years. I even recall the green screen having text *written* on it due to being on without a screen saver.

Re:So Long Novell

[bratloaf]

Really? 4K to move a server, install some very simple wiring and a switch, and 6 workstations? They wanted NO reconfiguration, no routing, no internet. They have a separate network for that, already installed at the new office.

I think 4K was really, really excessive. All together, including doing several hours of off-line testing on their accounting app, it took me maybe 6 hours. One workstation (PC) didn't survive the move (HD crash). But they only need 4 at the new location. After a week, we replaced all but one of the old PCs, and that one and the server will be replaced in a couple months.

That DEC stuff is really bulletproof. I do hear a little bearing noise from one of the drives, but I can hardly believe its still spinning...

Re:So Long Novell

[bratloaf]

The power supply is actually relatively clean. It was on a desk (not a floor) in a little used corner of the office. Old, USA made server hardware was pretty bullet proof. I think this thing is a P100, can't recall right now. Passively cooled CPU. Big, mostly empty box. I'm most impressed that the disks still spin. I can't wait to see what brand they are....

Re:So Long Novell

[bratloaf]

I also worked at a bank in the early 90's - all our file and print was Novell (3.1 mostly). The "teller line" servers would run for literally years between reboots. The only reason they even got replaced at all was the Y2K stuff. 3.1 was not certified Y2K, so we HAD to upgrade (even though we tested it back and forth 1000 times with the patch in place, and it was fine). Those were little Compaq servers with a 486/33 and I think maybe 32 or 64MB of RAM.

Re:So Long Novell

[bratloaf]

Correction, it was a 486/33!!, I just checked my upgrade notes.

Re:ANOTHER LINUX "COMPANY" BITES TEH DUST !!

[Anonymous Coward]

This wasn't just a Linux company. A major network vendor, and the COMPANY THAT OWNS UNIX! What a sad day.

Whats attachmate?

[vlm]

Whats "Attachmate"? Dating website? Some sort of trademarked fastener, you know, like tapcon (tm)?

Re:Whats attachmate?

[Anne Thwacks]

Whats "Attachmate"?

Some robotic device NSFW, I guess!

Re:Whats attachmate?

[Genda]

"What's the difference between a lawyer and a tick?... when you die, a tick falls off!." - Joke of the Day.

Re:Whats attachmate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I did anything with Attachmate, it was a 3270 emulation card for PCs.

Re:Whats attachmate?

[wassermana]

Another dinosaur. One that made (makes) hardware to connect PCs to mainframes. Mainframes are... oh, never mind. One dinosaur ate another.

Re:Whats attachmate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Attachmate is really just the corporate vehicle being used for the Novell acquisition by several software investment firms, who are now Novell's real owners.

Re:Whats attachmate?

[jd]

It's a papermate line of pens with added superglue.

Re:Whats attachmate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Attachmate is a Seattle-based company like GoDaddy, only with bison instead of leopards and elephants.

http://www.9news.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=108695&catid=346

Re:Whats attachmate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Attachmate is a Seattle-based company, similar to GoDaddy, except with bison rather than leopards and elephants.

http://www.9news.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=108695&catid=346

Re:Whats attachmate?

[geekoid]

Mainframes are alive and thriving.

They are a superb piece of technology that 'cloud computing' and PC servers and software are just starting to acquire. AND they are cheaper to run.

I can do thing with a 30 year old mainframe that STILL isn't in any consumer PC.

Re:Whats attachmate?

[youn]

>Whats "Attachmate"?

I think it's a friend who's needy... we all have one of those ;)

alternatively, it may be a BDSM position... not sure, not an expert in the field :)

Re:Whats attachmate?

[Anonymous Coward]

We REALLY don't want to know what you do with the card reader alone in the dark. Start with force feedback gaming devices and duct tape for a PC replacement.

Re:Whats attachmate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Attachmate's original product was a software mainframe terminal emulator for Windows systems. If I recall correctly it required an IRMALAN card at first but then went straight TCP/IP.
The last few years they have been on a buying spree.

Value

[tripleevenfall]

Andsomethingthatusedtobeofvaluewaslost?

Re:Value

[Anonymous Coward]

Andsomethingthatusedtobeofvaluewaslost?

Well, if you're Microsoft, then probably yes (note that this is from '95).

Open Source companies

[submain]

I wonder why companies that strongly support open source software are being bought by other companies - is there any correlation?. First Sun, now Novell. I sure hope that doesn't happen to IBM...

Re:Open Source companies

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this not marked as funny? Who could possibly buy IBM?

Re:Open Source companies

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't someone managed to buy GM recently?

Re:Open Source companies

[SnarfQuest]

Who would want to buy a company that had a $4 billion lawsuit against them?

Dealing with lawyers is a pain in the butt, think of dealing with 4 billion dollars worth of them chasing after them like they were an ambulance leaving an accident scene.

Re:Open Source companies

[malignant_minded]

from what i can see ibm has a different business model than those other companies. i dont work for ibm or have any business relationship with them but it appears they take all the cool stuff out there and try and put it together into a working solution they can sell. they got out of the laptop world which was smart since hardware is a losing place. imo they are doing the right thing. their support is expensive but they do bring solutions to the table and companies will always need that.

Re:Open Source companies

[betterunixthanunix]

Well, if you can name a company with the $200bn+ that it would take to acquire IBM...

I miss my worm screensaver

[Sigmon]

Fear the worm!

another ms partner..

[Jeek Elemental]

will meet you all here again when its Nokias turn

SCO won after all, so, what does that say?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's says it all, is what is says.

Re:SCO won after all, so, what does that say?

[Shimbo]

If this is victory, I don't know what defeat would look like. Novell shareholders will get roughly $2 billion dollars; SCO shareholders will probably get nothing.

Novell's rights to the legacy System V business was only of significant value in SCO's fantasy world where Linux was a derivate of System V.

Re:SCO won after all, so, what does that say?

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO. Attachmate. Is there really any difference? NO!

It's like the Wide World of Sports opening: "The ... AGONY OF DEFEAT!"

It's like a woman who straps a bomb on her back and boards a bus then realized it's empty when she pushes the button!

It's the Finns who realize Nokia has sold its soul to the devil!

It's Wile E. Coyote catching the Road Runner only to find Chrysler is no more!

It's like winning the lottery and dieing the next day!

It's like installing Linux to be free of MS, only to find out it's all in Geek!

21 gun salute, console edition.

[Jailbrekr]

FIRE PHASERS 21

pew! pew! pew! pew!

Re:21 gun salute, console edition.

[Anonymous Coward]

That would actually be:

FIRE 21 RIFLE.WAV

The "RIFLE.WAV" sound was one of the default sounds Novell included.

Re:21 gun salute, console edition.

[DragonHawk]

The ancient DOS IPX/SPX client had its own logon script language. One of the commands available was "FIRE PHASERS", which made an appropriate noise using the PC speaker.

I would guess the .WAV files must have come with the Windows client? I (like many Novell other people) jumped ship around then.

Crap

[93 Escort Wagon]

Now I feel really old. Again.

Re:ANOTHER LINUX "COMPANY" BITES TEH DUST !!

[Daniel Phillips]

Novell's demise is mainly a result of Microsoft's obsession with fighting old battles. Meanwhile, allowing itself to be outflanked on multiple fronts.

I don't think we really care who owns Unix, it's just a trademark. And Linux Is Not UniX.

this just in

[nimbius]

novel just sold something in the last decade!...oh wait...

Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I really want to know is what's the future of Mono then?

Impact on Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has there been any word on how, if at all this affects Novell's sponsorship of the Mono Project?

Snake colors

[Wyatt Earp]

We ran 3.1x through 5 on dual processor Compaq Proliant 5000s, the screen saver had the blue and red snakes.

If you ran it on quads, what were the colors of the other snakes? Anyone know?

Deeprun Tram in WoW has screens running Netware like screen savers too, but gnomes only run dual core in Deeprun.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Deeprun_Tram#Notes

Re:Snake colors

[moonbender]

Googling around I found this (very recent) re-implementation for Linux: LoadSnake

Re:Snake colors

[cyberchondriac]

Not sure about v3.1x, but on v6.5, the other worms are green and cyan (light blue)

Re:Snake colors

[Wyatt Earp]

Thanks, I doubt they ever updated that bit.

We always had red and blue snaking around on the screens.

Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[damn_registrars]

Sometimes, the company with the best product is not the company with the best business strategy. And we've seen before that when that happens, the company with the crappy product and the better business strategy almost always wins.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[grasshoppa]

You're basically talking about eDirectory vs Active Directory, right? And you are implying that eDirectory was the better product?

Uh no. That was true 15 years ago, but as soon as Active Directory came out it was time to jump ship to MS. Still, to this day Novell has a few hold outs ( and sadly, I've worked at several of them ). The difference between AD and ED is startling. Why any company would put up with ED is beyond me; I'm fairly certain that some of the CIOs involved were getting kick backs from Novell. That's the only thing that makes sense.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why any company would put up with ED is beyond me

Maybe they are currently celibate and don't really care about their ED?

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[grasshoppa]

So you're saying their Mac users?

Suddenly, it starts to make sense.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[Vancorps]

As someone that loved NDS and is less familiar with the later eDirectory, what didn't you like about it when compared with Active Directory of the same era? Only since Server 2008 has Active Directory met up with NDS functionality, did Novell screw the pooch on edirectory?

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[toadlife]

No. Mac users use special proprietary connectors when they mate.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

never heard of NDS or eDirectory, but why any company puts up with Active Directory is beyond me. If either of those 2 things are worse, I can't imagine how. I'm unfortunately forced to write authentication modules for AD from time to time and even using MS own libs the damn thing doesn't work. It reminds me most of IE, creating non-standard standards that only they follow, and then in the next version not following them either. It makes me want to vomit just thinking of it.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[toadlife]

I had a very long discussion with a Novell devotee about ED vs AD back in 2000 and from I got that ED and AD were functionally equivalent with different methods of implementing core functionality.

All of the disadvantages of AD he cited were the result of on him not really understanding how AD worked.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

Every system we run authenticates against our AD.

Maybe you're just incompetent.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[damn_registrars]

The value of eDirectory vs AD is debatable. However the advantages of Novell are clear regardless. Windows servers are bloated, overpriced, and underperforming with regards to reliability and capabilities. Netware servers would pull 5 or 6 nines routinely on their own, while you would need a server farm to pull even 4 or more nines with Windows server.

In other words, Netware was cheaper, more reliable, and required less hardware. On top of that, Netware had very few security flaws to tend to. On the other hand Windows ran poorly, was more expensive, and needed constant attention.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[Taelron]

Active Directory was originally technology licensed from Banyan Vines. When Banyan went under, Microsoft received free reign to use the technology wholesale.

Under Banyan Vines it was called StreetTalk. Your login was your name @ office @ organization or jsmith@houston@slashdot

It was far superior to NT 4.0's domain system and was licensed for inclusion into Active Directory starting with Windows 2000. In Banyan, all file shares and printers were easily located in the directory the same way. Resource @ server @ organization such as: publicfiles@serverca001@slashdot or xeroxprinter@serverny003, part of the reason Microsoft licensed the technology was to enable placing resources in the directory structure.

The downside to StreetTalk was networks with over 1024 servers. It was never intended to grow that large back in the 80's and early 90's. The largest Banyan Vines network was actually run by the United States Marine Corps with over 5800 servers. The Marines had to break the network up into three sections each containing less than 2000 servers. They created what was called ELMS gateways that linked and allowed some resources to be shared across the three different "zones".

Starting in 1998 the Marines Corps began transitioning away from Banyan Vines to Windows NT 4.0 and the release of Windows 2000 with Active Directory which was updated to address the issues the Marines had with large networks was the final deathblow to Banyan in the US market. Shortly afterwards Banyan announced they were going back to making hardware only and licensing the StreetTalk directory out. Within a couple of years Banyan was gone from the networking world.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uptime and security vulnerability count are geek metrics that don't mean shit to the bottom line for the vast majority of businesses.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[grasshoppa]

I was told the same thing, by admins who were in the process of recovering from an abend ( the window servers had no unplanned downtime in recent memory ).

So that throws reliability out the window ( pun not intended ). Next up, capability; Everything today is written for windows, and there are only a few edge cases that edirectory addresses that active directory can't do. So ya, toss that one out too. Bloated? That's a fuzzy term really, that most people fail to understand. Sure, the base install is large for 2008, but it doesn't cause any issues so I'm not counting that as a "problem".

Price is a matter between you and your vendor. I know novell CAN be more expensive, but it usually isn't. But when you factor in the "soft costs" ( actually using said software ), the costs tend to even themselves out.

So the case for MS is pretty cut and dry. I'm still unsure why anyone would willingly subject themselves to novell.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[rahvin112]

Why any company would put up with ED is beyond me;

Given that in this day and age there are several prescription treatments for ED along with dozens of bogus "herbal" remedies I can understand your frustration. No one should put up with ED anymore.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[damn_registrars]

Abends come when you load a novell module on a server that is already running; they are most often caused by missing or incorrect prerequisites. They don't just come out of thin air.

A Windows server, on the other hand, like any other Windows box, will occasionally crash just out of the blue. No Windows server has ever been anywhere remotely close on its own to a Netware server in terms of reliability.

Next up, capability; Everything today is written for windows

That is irrelevant. The server software that is important to run on a server is available on systems other than Windows.

Sure, the base install is large for 2008, but it doesn't cause any issues so I'm not counting that as a "problem".

Actually it does, because it makes it more difficult to troubleshoot the base install if something is awry. Of course, Windows admins are used to rebooting and reinstalling their entire OS, so they don't see that as a big deal.

So the case for MS is pretty cut and dry

Sure; use MS if you enjoy crashing, have extra piles of money lying around that you don't know what else to do with, and don't need more than 4 nines of stability. On the plus side, it gets you the same unstable GUI for administration that you have on your workstations - which are also crashing regularly.

I'm still unsure why anyone would willingly subject themselves to novell.

I have yet to see a case made for why anyone would want to use Windows for their servers. And you certainly haven't made a case for it...

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[NJRoadfan]

I remember them marketing the crap out of the fact they had US Government clients. Banyan's other weakness was their reliance on 16-bit DOS based networking stack. They didn't take the transition to Windows 95 clients very well. I remember using VINES in middle school with the text based login and all. I could never get a good answer from the admin why they choose it over something like Netware, its not like they had a huge network. They later transitioned to a NT Server 3.51 domain and eventually AD.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[grasshoppa]

Ah, a troll. You got me.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[Taelron]

Banyan's largest customer worldwide was the United States Marine Corps. The penetration into the US network market never exceeded 24%. They were actually much larger in Europe than they were in America having around 40% of the market.

Banyan originally started out making ICA (communication cards) for mainframes and other Network OS's. They decided to have a go at making their own NOS to exploit both the hardware and software side of the house. The Banyan servers sat on top of a bastardized unix operating system. Kernel access as they called it, effectively Root at the command line, was a tightly guarded secret, even though there was just one hard coded login for all Banyan Servers.

Quality Assurance was not a priority at Banyan, often times you would receive updates, but on several occasions you would have to apply a patch to a patch, before you patched your server. Instead of just releasing a total update package, you would have to update all patch files incrementally and then apply them to the server.

In 1995 we still had to use DOS clients and windows 3.1x computers. By 1996 we were rolling out Windows 95 machines with the Windows Banyan Client that worked decently enough, though your email (which was incorporated into the server code) was still a dos client. The windows clients with any functionality did not come out until almost 1997.

The servers came with all software installed and loaded for every option, but you required a dongle on the parallel port of your computer to unlock "features" of the software. You could place two dongles over each other and move features from one dongle to another (deactivating the first dongle). And use software codes to unlock new features on the dongles hashed against its serial number.

There were many features of Banyan we missed and hated losing when we switched to Windows NT 4.0 and Exchange 5.0 and 5.5... Though Banyan was example again of a company with a good technology failing to fully maintain and develop it.

In the air of full disclosure, I was a Banyan Certified Engineer (BCE) for the Marines back in the middle to late 90's.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[networkzombie]

Active Directory was not technology licensed from Banyan Vines. Active Directory and NetWare Directory Services were direct competitors. Banyan Vines licensing went to Unisys in 2003. Active Directory was based on the Exchange X.400 single store database written by Microsoft in 1996. Microsoft invested in Banyan in 1999 and the Banyan engineers worked with Microsoft engineers but by that time Active Directory was already in Windows 2000 which released in Beta in 1997, and I started using it in early 1999, months before Microsoft and Banyan engineers began working together.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[damn_registrars]

Well, if your opinions cloud your ability to perceive fact such that you don't know the difference between reality and troll, then I guess that statement may be accurate. Anyone who has actually managed both a Netware and a Windows Server would know better, though.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[grasshoppa]

Actually, what set you to troll status was the fact that you said windows will randomly crash. Anyone who's spent any time administrating windows knows that windows, by itself, doesn't randomly crash. Hasn't since the 2000 days. It's software and drivers ( note: the same thing that will abend your high and mighty netware servers ) that'll do it. Well, and flaky hardware. All of which are common problems for all OSes.

I've worked several places with SLES, netware and the various versions of windows running side by side. Windows was the most reliable ( as defined as the lowest amount of unexpected downtime ), followed by SLES, followed by netware. And I'm taking in to account similar services running ( file and print services ). Now, let's talk about running an SQL server on netware...oh you can't. SLES, you can run just about everything but MSSQL, which is prominent in the business world.

I'll grant you the troubleshooting issue you have with windows. Untrained, yes, windows is very hard to troubleshoot and diagnose. Took me years to get to the point where it's as easy to diagnose as linux.

Based on my experience, windows is more stable than netware, more versatile and offers greater management possibilities. eDirectory doesn't really offer anything over active directory that would interest a majority of businesses, and it comes with client software that is just another layer to worry about to boot.

On top of all of that, it's easier to find windows admins than it is to find edirectory/netware/Sles admins, thus HR over head is cheaper.

So who's case is weak now?

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[cusco]

Best example ever of that was Digital Equipment Corp. Best hardware in the world, worst salesmen in the world. My former boss used to call engineering support to get pricing on equipment because the salescritters would never call her back.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[Shuntros]

You ARE joking, right?

You'll get no argument from me in regard to the shortcomings of Novell's business strategy, but eDirectory was light years ahead of AD for over a decade. AD 2008 is pretty good, but it still lacks many of the enterprise class features of eDirectory. Whilst ConsoleOne was a source of constant irritation bulk user management was trivial when using tools like the JRB utilities. I used to manage an eDirectory with over 100,000 users and it barely broke a sweat.

From a core file/print perspective Netware simply kicked ass; the technology behind filesystems like NSS makes NTFS look positively prehistoric. AD and NTFS don't even have a proper inherited rights implementation, I mean come on?! Layer stuff like Identity Manager, Zen and Storage Manager on top of it and you've got complete workflow management, policy driven desktop config and app delivery, and intelligent dynamic storage management. The clustering support was also excellent.

Of the 2 local universities 1 runs OES (netware services on Linux, basically) and the other moved to Windows. The support costs at the latter went through the roof.

Personally I don't care either way any more; I'm well out of the hands-on NOS management space. What I see these days when recruiting is that those with pure Windows experience can support Windows. Those with Netware experience can support anything.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[damn_registrars]

I can't agree with you more on that one. At one point I had in my hardware ensemble at work a quad-cpu Alpha, each cpu at 667 MHz and 8gb ram total. That one box was faster than an entire rack of 2GHz Intel P4 systems. DEC was then sold to Compaq, who merged with HP. Which lead to the death of one of the greatest RISC chips the world has ever seen.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[grasshoppa]

Bulk user tools in AD ain't nothing to sneeze at either. Assuming I can target a large group of users, I could handle 100,000 without breaking a sweat as well. And while the technology behind NSS may be more sophisticated than NTFS, how does that translate? Where does the tire meet the road in that case? I have more flexibility with NTFS than I do with NSS ( talk to me about deny rights ), so how does NSS make my job easier? How does it make a user's job easier? And iPrint is a joke, when compared to shared printers in Windows.

Zenworks is garbage. I hate to be the one to break that to you, but it's bloated crap that causes no end of headaches for the end users. I replaced that with a few other apps and everyone was happier.

You had crap admins then, at the university that ran windows. I know the industry average is 50 servers to an admin, but I've always been able to handle closer to 1000 ( depending on work loads ) myself.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[cusco]

NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 worked great on the Alpha, and DEC had an office in Redmond where they were working with MS to port Win2k as well. They were well into testing when Compaq bought them and within a month shut down the project. IIRC the Compaq CEO was heavily invested in Intel and didn't want to see any competition (which is also why the resisted using AMD processors for long after Dell and HP were installing them).

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[Anonymous Coward]

AD has never measured up to NDS in almost any measurable way. I have managed both directory types since each was spawned in numerous large Enterprises.

AD has far greater performance overhead, is only limited in LDAP compliance (minimal compliance), requires more complex infrastructue, has poor out of the box management tools, has poor resiliency, a poor rudundency model.

Of course, where MS does well with AD is development support, via their API. And at a higher-level, MS provides robust development tools to the Development community... MS has earned developer mind-share.

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[grasshoppa]

I am honestly curious, can you give examples of AD has far greater performance overhead, is only limited in LDAP compliance (minimal compliance), requires more complex infrastructue, has poor out of the box management tools, has poor resiliency, a poor rudundency model?

Re:Corporate Darwinism, I guess...

[Vancorps]

I would hope that no one is a devotee of any product that is in an admin position. I ran into delegation issues with Active Directory left and right, I had far more granular control over with NDS and at least the first release of eDirectory. Around that time I left my job as a Netware Admin and was mostly in the Windows world.

Of course environments were much simpler in those days so my perception could well be off.

Re:ANOTHER LINUX "COMPANY" BITES TEH DUST !!

[rudy_wayne]

And Linux Is Not UniX.

Funny you should say that, because there's a post from Linus Torvalds on kerneltrap.org in which he says that that Linux is Unix. Unfortunately, the entire kerneltrap.org site seems to be down right now, but if it ever comes back up you can find his post here: http://kerneltrap.org/node/11

Looks like a patent trolling company.

[Anonymous Coward]

2011 The Attachmate Group, Inc.

1233 West Loop South
Suite 810
Houston, TX 77027

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[account_deleted]

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free at last?

[redfood]

Maybe my employer will finally move away from Novell's terrible Web Services, GroupWise, and iPrint.

I have a dream that one day I'll be able to have my name, longer than 8 characters, supported as a username w/o being cut off.

Re:free at last?

[MarcQuadra]

Actually, I've always wondered this. Are there a lot of corrupt/illegal kickbacks in I.T.? I'm not in management, but sometimes it feels like the entire organization is pointing at a cheap, simple, effective solution, and management goes and picks some multi-million-dollar monster that takes a year to set up.

Also, I've met a LOT of I.T. sales folks, and most give me the willies.

Re:free at last?

[redfood]

In Novell's case I think its inertia. There was a time that Novell offered a suit of solutions that worked together well and made things easier. Eventually, industry surpassed Novell.

Good IT managers are conservative. In the short term, "If it ain't broke don't fix it" is a good motto. But sometimes sticking with the old becomes a burden and its good to be proactive. Knowing when to migrate or upgrade (and when not to) is what separates the good managers from the great ones.

I'm guessing you are an engineer. The willies you get from sales is your BS detector going off. The sales people are selling product they don't completely understand. The management making the buy decision is buying a product they don't completely understand. But the sales people and the management speak the same language. The engineers usually do not. So the management trusts the sales people and the "monster" is purchased.

Re:free at last?

[geekoid]

In my experience, the answer most often is that the simple solution really isn't the best for all parties. Every group that will use a piece of software has a simple solution. And it doesn't work for any of the other groups that will be using the software.

Really, very few IT have any real idea of the scope of a prefect needed for a company as a whole.

I am a technical resource for a lot of projects, and some pretty big ones that many people seem to think should be simple.

Time Keeping, for example.

If IT sales folk give you the willies, DO NOT ACCEPT them, they will no doubt be attached to a vague contract~

Re:free at last?

[HornWumpus]

Are there a lot of corrupt/illegal kickbacks in IT?

Yes.

The worst I've done is buy thousand dollar dinners for 'decision makers' and there wives, calling it a working dinner and billing it back. I wasn't an official salesperson though.

The worst by reputation is Oracle sales. Decision makes get no-show or at least no-work jobs at 10x their previous salary.

Re:free at last?

[LDAPMAN]

That 8 character limitation is the choice of your company. User names for eDir/Netware/OES can be up to 128 characters.

Re:free at last?

[redfood]

Really? Before I was annoyed now I'm bitter.

Novell behaved perfectly rationally

[JTW]

Software companies have their own "physical laws" of operation.

1. Innovate
2. Incorporate
3. Reorganize
4. Downsize
5. Distribute the proceeds

It's just completing the cycle.

I couldn't name a company that has escaped this Schwartz child limit. Microsoft isn't so much that type of company as a "holding company" and it has a longer life cycle. If companies were stars, Microsoft would be a red dwarf, Novell a yellow sun, Netscape a blue giant (or maybe a Eta Carinae that went Nova).

If Microsoft lasts as long it could be with us for billions and billions of years (lol).

Re:Novell behaved perfectly rationally

[Icegryphon]

If Microsoft lasts as long it could be with us for billions and billions of years (lol).

God I wish there was a +1 Scary moderator option.

Re:Novell behaved perfectly rationally

[geekoid]

What a stupid pile of crap.

Things grow, and eventually die. Geez, what a fucking lighting bolt of wisdom that is.

How do you explain the software companies that dies before step 3?

Re:Novell behaved perfectly rationally

[Anonymous Coward]

Weyland Industries, my friend, Weyland industries.

Can't live on legacy business forever

[sjbe]

They had a HUGE place in business servers years ago, and then they just sat down on their laurels, and never stood back up.

Their Netware product was arguably better that Microsoft's offerings but the problem was that Microsoft's competing product was good enough for most customers and it was cheaper and bundled. Businesses don't make money by buying network management software. Novell built their Netware business around features that was missing in Microsoft's offerings. When Microsoft provided it, Novell's business model no longer made sense. The only reason they hung around as long as they did is because ripping that sort of software out and replacing it is an expensive pain in the ass. But you can't live on legacy customers forever.

For the same reasons I would never buy (to hold) stock in an anti-virus vendor, inkjet cartridge refill company, or any other company whose business is based on some mis-feature of another company's product. They can be put out of business very easily.

An era

[geekoid]

the required 54 3.5" floppies to install it's product. Also, an era of crappy network stack design.

Ximian not Simian

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be Ximain not Simiam Gnome.

Someone else had the rights to "Helix" which Realplayer later used for their open source efforts.

Re:ANOTHER LINUX "COMPANY" BITES TEH DUST !!

[Daniel Phillips]

And Linux Is Not UniX.

Funny you should say that, because there's a post from Linus Torvalds on kerneltrap.org in which he says that that Linux is Unix. Unfortunately, the entire kerneltrap.org site seems to be down right now, but if it ever comes back up you can find his post here: http://kerneltrap.org/node/11

What Linus actually said in that thread was: "the design of UNIX made a scaffolding for the system".

To be honest, "Linux" just means "Linus's Unix clone". But I prefer my interpretation, don't you think it's clever?

Over time, Linux has evolved from "close enough to run most oldtime Unix programs" to obeying Posix/SUS really pedantically closely. You could say "Linux is not Unix[tm] but it is Posix". And then a lot more of course.

I shall play a game of Snipes in your honor.

[The Archon V2.0]

Been sysadminning NetWare on and off since the bindery days. So long Novell, gonna miss you.

Re:ANOTHER LINUX "COMPANY" BITES TEH DUST !!

[d6]

Quit trolling AC. We all know SCO owns linux.

Novell lives? Lantastic!

[PinchDuck]

Anyone remember the sheep? Novell pretty much did them in. I'll bet they're laughing now.

Future planning?

[peaceful_bill]

Hello slashdotters.

Are system administrators migrating away from Novell? We run Novell at our school, and I'll start looking for alternatives if I have to. The issue is our 2 system administrators have years of experience with Novell. It is a stable, reliable platform, and works well.

I am concerned about software updates, security fixes, things like that.

Re:Future planning?

[JohnnyDoh]

Yes. As soon as I heard that Novell received an unsolicited bid from a hedge fund, I started planning to migrate away. Unfortunately, the free tools that Microsoft included with Server 2003 are no longer included in Server 2008, so you'll need some 3rd party tools to assist with the migration. Quest makes some tools that are very good but very pricey.

Netware could a been good

[Anonymous Coward]

They should open source Netware. Super fast protocol engine . . could be a great appliance product.

Here's where Novell went wrong:

Here's why:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/104760/An_Unabashedly_Biased_View_of_the_Passing_of_a_Network_Titan

Please stop the FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stop with your FUD campaign. Novell is not "passing". It is alive and well and will continue to provide support for its current products and invent new ones. Attachmate has already said it will enlarge the R&D budget. Suse Linux Enterprise Server is a well respected distribution that is used in many places and OpenSuse will continue to be maintained.

If you want to worry about something, worry about what is happening with Novell's patents.

Novell vs Microsoft

[DragonHawk]

There are a number of things in your post that are, at best, highly dubious, if not outright wrong.

"there network stack was horrid, and they where late to tcp/ip. trying to force IPX to be the de facto standard"

NetWare's IPX stack was quite good for what it was designed for (running NetWare on LANs). It's limitations also made it faster for those simple tasks it could do.

For a time IPX *was* the de facto standard on a lot of corporate LANs, with IP being seen as the outsider. That all changed when the Internet suddenly made it big, circa 1994. Now everybody wanted to use the Internet. For a time, there was a significant market of IPX-to-IP proxy servers just for that reason.

The university world, where IP was popular earlier on, always thought IPX was this weird thing (and it was), but it was the other way around on business networks.

"They moved very expensive net cards at cost, and if pressed they would give you netware."

They certainly never gave me NetWare! :) But I'm not a representative sample, and I don't have data to argue with you on that. Maybe they did. But I can say for sure that they charged an arm and a leg for their network cards. Cards with the exact same chips and PCB but without the "Yes!" label cost considerably less.

"Novell could not handle large business and large business number of users."

That I have to disagree with. When NT first came out (1993), a lot of corporate admins laughed at it, because it struggled to handle the user load NetWare could. NetWare could easily handle 1000+ connections at once on hardware NT could maybe do 100.

Now, NT had the NTLM domain system right off, while NetWare 3.x was still a "every server has its own users" model. But NetWare 4.x appeared right after NT, and it could scale to many more users than NT could, using a single organization namespace. (In NT land, it was common to create domains *just* to hold users, and other domains *just* to hold resources, and join them with trusts, because NT would fall apart under the load otherwise.)

It took Microsoft until Windows 2000 and Active Directory to catch up with that.

"By the 90s MS TCP/IP implementation was starting to blow Novell IPX out of the water..."

Microsoft didn't even *have* an IP stack until 1993 in NT and Windows for Workgroups. The NT IP stack was slow and the the WfW IP stack crashed all the time. Win9x and NT 4.x improved things considerably, but IPX was still faster because it was more limited. But because the Internet had hit, everyone wanted to run IP now. SMB could run over IP from NT on. NetWare didn't do that until 5.x, several years later. So if you went Microsoft, you could run only one network protocol, and that itself was a performance win. If you were running NetWare, you had to be dual-stack, and that cost both bandwidth and RAM.

"When this happened Novell was the big player, MS was small time."

Novell was king of LANs, but Microsoft was still a big player. I believe Microsoft wielded more influence than Novell. Sure, if you had a server, you were likely running NetWare. But all your clients would be running MS-DOS -- and maybe MS-Windows, too -- and you have more clients than servers. You might also be running other Microsoft products (e.g., FoxPro), while Novell basically just had one product -- NetWare.

What really killed NetWare was that all it was really good for was file and print (and later, directory). Initially and/or by default, programs all ran in ring zero with no memory protection, only cooperative multitasking, and no disk swapping. Software running on NetWare had to be *very* well written, or it would kill the server. Most programmers just aren't that good.

NT, for all its faults and instabilities, had memory protection and preemptive multitasking. Any idiot with a copy of Visual Basic could chu

NetWare reliability

[DragonHawk]

"Abends come when you load a novell module on a server that is already running; they are most often caused by missing or incorrect prerequisites. They don't just come out of thin air."

ABENDs either come from NetWare internal code failing a check, or from CPU exceptions. In my experience, CPU exceptions were more common. And the leading cause of that was bad code.

In NetWare, by default, everything runs in ring 0, in the same memory space, with cooperative multitasking. One bad program can scribble over kernel memory, or get stuck in a loop, or divide by zero, and the whole machine will crash. The tools to isolate NLMs arrived too late and did too little.

So on NetWare, bad application code crashes the server. On Windows, bad application code crashes that one process.

Yes, the culprit is poorly-written software, but guess what -- there's a lot of that out there. I would say most software is poorly-written. Businesses still need/want to run it. So they pick the OS that handles it better.

Early versions of NT -- especially 4.x -- were very crash-prone, but with good hardware and good drivers, 2003 and later are quite solid. (And NetWare certainly didn't like crummy hardware either. Nothing does, really. It's hard to work around the hardware you're running on.)

It sounds like you're still clinging to a circa 1998 perception of Microsoft Windows, with your dogged focus on Windows crashing all the time. That's simply not the case anymore. And indeed, that was Novell's problem, too. They always saw Microsoft in terms of what Microsoft was in 1995. They ignored the progress Microsoft was making, and it killed them.

Active Directory from Banyan?

[DragonHawk]

"Active Directory was originally technology licensed from Banyan Vines."

Do you have anything to support that statement? In other words: Citation needed.

I've got a fair bit of experience with AD. I didn't work with StreetTalk much, but from what I've seen, they were radically different in their internals.

AD is basically LDAP bolted on top of the old NTLM domain system. Overall MSFT actually did a reasonably good job at that, but the old NTLM origins still poke through the covers in a few places (mainly the lower-level security stuff). The actual directory part of AD seems to have been derived from the Exchange Directory Service, which was an X.500 implementation that supported LDAP and integrated with NTLM domains (sound familiar?). When the DS moved from Exchange to Windows and became AD, Exchange lost its built-in DS and switched to using AD. AD uses the same ESE (Extensible Storage Engine, formerly known as the Exchange Storage Engine) backend that Exchange brought to life. In Windows and Exchange 2000, there were actually a number of problems because Exchange was still so tightly coupled to the directory that weird compatibility problems would occasionally crop up on Exchange servers -- especially if the server was also a Domain Controller.

This blog post I just found, purportedly from someone who actually worked at MSFT on AD back then, would appear to agree:
http://blog.joeware.net/2008/08/11/1420/

Copy NetWare to USB

[DragonHawk]

"I'm more interested in how you backed up the server to USB when all of the computers were made before USB ports existed."

He would have had to use a network client, since a NetWare server generally didn't do any I/O to removable drives. You couldn't even do file management from the server console without loading some optional modules. (NetWare could use the floppy drive, but it depended on DOS to handle the I/O, so it had to switch back and forth between real mode and i386 mode, so it was the slowest thing imaginable.)

So that guy prolly just connected his laptop to the LAN, attached to the NetWare server, mapped the drives (NetWare exposed all of it's drives to the network all the time; there was no separate "Share this folder" process), and copied the files.

Re:Copy NetWare to USB

[bratloaf]

Bingo. Just used a newer laptop. Backed it all up over the network to my thumb drive. (and made a second copy onto the laptop too, just for kicks). Thats also what I used to do testing to be sure that if it all bit the dust I could get their accounting software to run on a peer to peer (or a laptop). A couple simple subst mappings and it was running on the laptop.

Sometimes older (simpler) stuff is great...

Know good?

[pnutjam]

know, I don't know how knowbody could knot have switched from Knowvelle years ago, you know...