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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."
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
will meet you all here again when its Nokias turn
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.
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.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin