Would you please explain the problem that this causes. Are you planning to do anything that you really don't want the government knowing about? Yes, I am:+) I am not talking criminal activity here - When I am away from home, I send my wife intimate letters, I make phone calls to her I would be embarrassed to have eavesdropped. I don't want *any* of this to be available to any government official who is interested - It should be only be available to a police officer who has convinced a Judge it is needful to solve a criminal investigation. If I *didn't* believe this, I would use postcards and talk to people by broadcast radio.
When you enter a society you give up your rights, to gain protection. This is what is happening. If you don't like it, leave the country. As a member of society, I am willing to give up those rights needful to for that society as a whole to function; I expect in return safeguards and public accountability for those that have access to those powers, and for abuse of those powers to carry a jail term. This isn't happening here.
Now, the idea of forcing you to give them your key, with a two year jail term if you don't give them it, even if you just lost it is a bit excessive. However, if the government knows you have kiddie porn on your computer, but as they are walking in you encrypt it, should they be able to force you to give them the key? Ah, enter the Four Horsemen of the Internet. Can we please have a bit of originality here? NO-ONE is going to hand over their keys if it only costs them two years inside to refuse - Serving five years for child abuse (with what tends to happen to convicted child porn suppliers inside) isn't going to be a viable option. This is ONLY going to be served on innocent correspondents of suspected criminals, who are going to be frightened enough to abandon the master key to every "secure" message they have ever received rather than serve time. The keyword is INNOCENT here - not KiddiePorn supplier, not KiddiePorn perverted watcher, but bankers and travel agents.
If they can't then you will go free and a child molester is on the streets. Is that safety? Works for me. Any criminal dumb enough to drop themselves into ANY jail term worse than the two years for non-production of a key, is going to be too dumb to encrypt their data in the first place. Any criminal smart enough to encrypt, will use a different and probably Stenoed storage method; This law will be about as affective against KiddiePorn as a law that requires all KiddiePorn suppliers to register themselves at the local police station so they can be picked up more conveniently... --
Unfortunately, this posting has missed the two main thrusts of the bill. ISPs have been "cooperating" for years with the LEAs provided they produce the correct paperwork (most insist on a court order; some don't) but this is pretty normal - I don't think anyone can really object to the police having a right to tap any communication device given a suitable bench warrant. The *real* problems are these:-
The RIP "orders" don't require a judge's signature - they can be issued based on several different people's authorisation, don't have any time or size limits, and don't need to justify their existance to anyone
Give the authorised authorities, without judicial review, the right to write out an order as follows:
Demand from an *innocent* person, not suspected of any crime, their secret decryption keys - on the basis that the demanding officer thinks that it appears *to him* that some data he has seen was encrypted
Emprisonment if you don't produce a key - not HAVING a key is not a defence unless you can prove you never had it; this is impossible anyhow, and could make the common procedure of expiring keys and generating new ones at regular intervals a criminal offence
Emprisonment if you tell anyone you have been required to hand over a key - even by changing your key if the LEA thinks that will tip people off (and yes, this does let them continue to read your mail indefinitely)
No requirement to safeguard the key once they have it - so if you are a bank, and are forced to hand over your electronic funds transfer key, you may find the local plod's cleaners can pick it up.
No legal right to appeal (apart from to a closed board not required to publish or justify their decisions) or compensation (there *is* a discressionary compensation scheme, but I suspect if your business loses four or five billion after a competing firm gets details of every bid you put in (and undercuts you by one dollar:+) you may find they don't think you are entitled to it.
There are just SO MANY reasons why this is wrong and open to abuse - none of which seem to have been considered while drafting it. --
To me, an ISP is a bit like a post (mail) office. If you mail an illegal document to someone, you shouldn't hold the mailman responsiblle for delivering it. It's the same for ISP's - they just deliver. Unfortunately, the same rules would cover this - if they can get an order to tap your phone, they can get one to open your mail. --
If I were the CIO of a large company, I would be worried that my negotiating position would be much weaker with UCITA. After all, it pretty much creates a legal software cartel. Why would any member of this cartel break ranks and give me what I want, when I wouldn't be able to get it from any other vendor? I agree - the canonical example of this (Microsoft) has been doing this for years, purely on a pricing scale basis. If they suddenly get the legal RIGHT to enforce whatever shrinkwrap they want, don't you think they will grab it with both hands?
But my real concern would be that the legislation could trigger an even greater decline in the quality of shrinkwrapped software. Yep - if you are not allowed to claim for faulty software costing your business billions, not allowed to even TELL anyone it has done so, and not even entitled to have a set of terms you can sign (as they can vary the terms of your licence at any time) why should they care about software testing? It's not as if the total dismal failure of a firm due to their software's miswritten routines dropping the firm into legal hot water can even be reported... --
No reason! Sheesh. How about the R&D effort expended on the RAID capability? Is expended already - yes, it is reasonable to price your product to cover research costs in x years, and still make a profit, but not quite so reasonable to try and make you pay a premium for features that should be standard. If they weren't making a profit *and* working towards breakeven at the $20 pricepoint, they wouldn't be selling at that price at all. So the price difference of $45 is pure profit - due to what amounts to a lie about how much improvement you are getting over the $20 card.
Should Promise be punished for engineering the card so that it could be modified to be a simple ATA controller? Is their $65 price point exhorbitant? No, it's a marketing tactic - the Raid controller market is profitable at $65, the Standard ATA controller market wouldn't be, so they sell at $20 - this does'nt mean the $65 is an unreasonable price for that market, it means the market AS A WHOLE is artificially high-priced. --
To me, the more notable thing is that you can buy a RAID controller for $65... the ability to get it in a clandestine manner for $20 instead is not as interesting, IMHO. Not really - the point is that the Cheaper card IS the same as the more expensive one, with features disabled so they can charge a higher price for the one with raid. It's not the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last, but they have no reason not to be selling the raid-enabled card for the $20 and forgetting the poor-brother mode one...... --
Unfortunately, the FIRST thing that filtering software blocks is any proxy servers that it knows about - regardless of what you specify to be blocked, it assumes proxy servers are an example of that class and adds them to the banned list. --
Ugh, the threshold workaround. We had to do this due to (guess what?) a nasty bug with Client32 2.2 and NW 3.11, and it slowed message processing to a real crawl. I seem to remember it working above the PO level, like maybe at the domain level, though. We've banished all those evil revisions to the archive tapes, thankfully. We didn't find it that bad - on a 400-user-max-postoffice system, admittedly. you may have had much bigger POs to deal with - we had a decent working max as each department had it's own PO, and indeed often it's own server - I always suspected it wouldn't scale well, even if the Novell salesdroids were pushing it as the complete enterprise/wan/gan solution... --
I can't see why the majority of Net sales should or even CAN be regarded as anything other than Mail Order or Telephone Service sales - obviously dividing this into cases where a good is delivered by post or electronically (online sales of something tangible) as opposed to cases were prices are charged for entertainment or other non-tangible services. Most countries already have policies in place to deal with these cases - why not just apply them??? --
My guess, with what I've known of Windows 9x over these years, is they already had the driver installed once before on that computer. So when it came around this time, it did not need the drivers because Windows already knew they were already there... In fairness, that scanner was by then well over a year old, and Windows98SE was released in the interim - it is possible it has been added to the standard list of supported devices (given it embarrassed MS before, I suspect they would make DAMNED SURE that there was a working, MS-written driver for it) and if the CABs for those were on the HD, it wouldn't prompt for a floppy. But I agree - it is probable that the exact hardware setup was tested by adding and removing the scanner several times, and then BG refused to have Windoze reinstalled on the offchance it still didn't work on the night:+) --
I don't think the caldera client is NDS aware. There's two different things going on... the first is the IPX bit that lets you use a novell server, log in to the server, use its resources. The second is the NDS Tree which allows you to use any resource you have rights to use on the entire LAN (or WAN), which can extend over several servers, or geographical locations. The Caldera client is a full NW client - including NDS and bindary logins. you may be confusing it with MARS_NWE which emulates a server, but can only manage bindary support (and comes with a login client and an IPX stack for linux) --
When we ran 4.1 it was a nightmare keeping the database uncorrupted -- clients would FUBAR and then the database would go south, requiring a horrificly slow OFCHECK to get it fixed. there was a workaround for that - one of the modes was to set threshhold level for post office forwarding. if you set it to 1, you could make the database read-only for users, and they would dump their messages/updates in the local po-server's in queue for it to process --
I think the main problem here is that Novell's main shrinkwrap product IS NDS - it may be bundled with servers or other software, but when it comes down to it, it is the licences you are paying for (I don't know many organisations that don't have far more netware install cds than they need, but only the licence-key disks they actually use. That's because the CDs are interchangable, and in many cases you are better off using just ONE CD consistantly to avoid revision-changes causing problems during installs to an existing tree). Giving away any more than they have to of their "core" product isn't going to happen. In addition, I am told the majority of their income comes from their training and licencing (CNx programs) and authorised partnerships - paying a substantial fee to gain access to tools and technologies needed to successfully troubleshoot netware installations. If they made too much of their "crown jewels" available, then they would lose much or all of this income. --
with NDS running on Linux, there will probably be a whole new crop of servers that once ran something proprietary but get replaced with Linux. It happened with Web servers, mail servers, and, to a certain extent, SMB-based fileservers, now it will happen to directory servers. Even if NDS on Linux isn't a free source download (and I'm not holding my breath for that), it must still be cheaper than buying Netware. Hmm. there is already an IPX/Netware emulator for Linux (similar to the Samba Windoze share emulator) but it is not NDS enabled. I will be interested if the NDS licence allows you to patch this to make an NDS aware MARS server, or even forbids you to run/install a MARS server on the same box..... --
isn't there already a Caldera NDS client? I always wondered what that was like; it seemed like a great idea when it was first introduced all those years ago. there is, yes - but it approaches it from the other angle; that of a Linux desktop logging into a NDS server (like a Windoze box does) rather than a Linux server supporting NDS logins. --
Novell might be better served putting out a commercial version first and then changing over to GPL later... I can't see the reasoning here - if they are unwilling to run GPL nds, then they are unwilling to run Linux at all. If they are willing to wear linux with a suitable support contract, than (provided redhat is offering support for this) they will still be willing to accept LinuxNDS under the same terms. --
I'm in two minds about this - Groupwise 4 (a good, usually stable, and easy-to-administer product) was cross-platform with a vengence - it supported most unixes, most intel platform OSs and VMS. It was ENTIRELY flatfile-database - so if you could get your client to look at the postoffice, you could connect to and use that postoffice, regardless of platform for either server or client. if you needed to debug, you could manually trace the interchange-flatfiles used for communication between postoffices and/or domains and find the holdups.
Groupwise 5 added document sharing and document storage to the mix, but in MHO breaking the 4.x model and adding tight ties to NDS was one of the worst things ever to happen to the product. Integration modules, yes - but I think that if novell had had a bigger market share, they would have been up on the same stand as Microsoft over that one....... --
NDS for Solaris has been a product for a while. Sun support is old news.:-) I know - but I doubt it will be the same code as the Linux one - particularly after the OSS community get their hands on it and start writing bugfixes and utils tied to the NDS directory structure. I suspect all of this will be Novell's exclusive property to port to other *nix platforms, pending seeing the actual licence used of course:+) --
With the right marketing and some push Novell could lock down the corporate market on this one... More than that - given that NDS has pretty much a consistant user interface, this could easily blur the dividing lines between different server platforms from the viewpoint of Windoze-locked Users - if you logon to a NDS prompt, and get a mapped drive to your home and working directories, email, printers and web access, does it really matter what operating system provides those services?
For those of you that have not experienced the ease of admin dealing with a well designed NDS tree you are really missing out. Not to mention the deep joy of doing it once, and KNOWING it is done *right*, equally applied to all the servers needed and will be backed up for all eternity next time the tapes spool:+) --
Enterprise Level Directory NDS is provably scalable to millions of users on thousands of servers, all centrally managed.
Remote Gui tool an entire NDS directory can be managed from a windoze workstation (and this is being ported to Java so that Xwindows will be a viable platform too)
Cross platform NDS can manage your NT, Linux, Workstation and Netware user permissions from one user object, grant printer rights, email accounts, border (internet/wan) routing rights, and a dozen other things (obviously providing these systems are NDS enabled). If you have ever had to set up a new user, or remove a user no longer welcome on your company's premises than you will known what a nightmare this can be to administer quickly.
#linux: 0 we will have w2k directory one day... which the ms rep said was better than novell's (embed grain salt) but novell and linux? should be interesting. I suspect that Linux will be a foothold into NDS for commercial-unix - once LinuxNDS proves stable and reliable, it will be ported to HPUX and sun..... --
If nothing else, I doubt that M$oft will be handing out Active Directory for Linux anytime soon - and NDS is both better and cross-platform supported. --
I have noticed that the phrase, "open some of the code", is becoming common place in press lately. Obviously this is a key to the future of exceptence of the open source model. I would rather have a bit to work with then nothing. I am going to reserve judgement on this one until I see both the code and the licence; Novell have a past history of being as restrictive as they think they can get away with where licencing is concerned; The last thing I imagine anyone would want is for Novell to release this under any of the following:
Such a restrictive licence that you are prevented from using the OSS "netware server" software for linux in conjunction with it
giving Novell the right to run the current OSS code as closed-source "official" novell products for other unix platforms (basically, doing all of Novell's beta testing and bugfixing for them on Linux before they do the simple port to big "commerical" *nix systems.
simply re-closing the source at a later point when all the major bugs are fixed, so that they can charge for development tools again. On the other hand, they HAVE started posting to their website the dev tools that used to be one of their more expensive cashcows, so they *may* be gaining Clue due to MS's competition - we will have to wait and see.
Even with a standard commercial licence, this is a tremendous step forward - NDS, for all it is a damned expensive way of administering a network, is still the best way I have seen to date. It is stable, cross-platform (and single-login enabling) and can manage almost anything (from remote resources to application licence counting to bandwidth allocation from NDS enabled routers). However, the company I work for rejected it for NT administration - purely on the pricing structure; for each registered (not concurrent!) user, per server, you had to pay a large NDS licence fee, with obviously the cost of a standard NT user licence on top of that. I would want to see how the new NLS "per user" model is applied to both the Linux and Nt clients - and how much a Server licence for Linux is under this scheme..... --
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Yes, I am
I am not talking criminal activity here - When I am away from home, I send my wife intimate letters, I make phone calls to her I would be embarrassed to have eavesdropped. I don't want *any* of this to be available to any government official who is interested - It should be only be available to a police officer who has convinced a Judge it is needful to solve a criminal investigation. If I *didn't* believe this, I would use postcards and talk to people by broadcast radio.
When you enter a society you give up your rights, to gain protection. This is what is happening. If you don't like it, leave the country.
As a member of society, I am willing to give up those rights needful to for that society as a whole to function; I expect in return safeguards and public accountability for those that have access to those powers, and for abuse of those powers to carry a jail term. This isn't happening here.
Now, the idea of forcing you to give them your key, with a two year jail term if you don't give them it, even if you just lost it is a bit excessive. However, if the government knows you have kiddie porn on your computer, but as they are walking in you encrypt it, should they be able to force you to give them the key?
Ah, enter the Four Horsemen of the Internet. Can we please have a bit of originality here? NO-ONE is going to hand over their keys if it only costs them two years inside to refuse - Serving five years for child abuse (with what tends to happen to convicted child porn suppliers inside) isn't going to be a viable option. This is ONLY going to be served on innocent correspondents of suspected criminals, who are going to be frightened enough to abandon the master key to every "secure" message they have ever received rather than serve time. The keyword is INNOCENT here - not KiddiePorn supplier, not KiddiePorn perverted watcher, but bankers and travel agents.
If they can't then you will go free and a child molester is on the streets. Is that safety?
Works for me. Any criminal dumb enough to drop themselves into ANY jail term worse than the two years for non-production of a key, is going to be too dumb to encrypt their data in the first place. Any criminal smart enough to encrypt, will use a different and probably Stenoed storage method; This law will be about as affective against KiddiePorn as a law that requires all KiddiePorn suppliers to register themselves at the local police station so they can be picked up more conveniently...
--
- Unfortunately, this posting has missed the two main thrusts of the bill. ISPs have been "cooperating" for years with the LEAs provided they produce the correct paperwork (most insist on a court order; some don't) but this is pretty normal - I don't think anyone can really object to the police having a right to tap any communication device given a suitable bench warrant. The *real* problems are these:-
- The RIP "orders" don't require a judge's signature - they can be issued based on several different people's authorisation, don't have any time or size limits, and don't need to justify their existance to anyone
- Give the authorised authorities, without judicial review, the right to write out an order as follows:
- Demand from an *innocent* person, not suspected of any crime, their secret decryption keys - on the basis that the demanding officer thinks that it appears *to him* that some data he has seen was encrypted
- Emprisonment if you don't produce a key - not HAVING a key is not a defence unless you can prove you never had it; this is impossible anyhow, and could make the common procedure of expiring keys and generating new ones at regular intervals a criminal offence
- Emprisonment if you tell anyone you have been required to hand over a key - even by changing your key if the LEA thinks that will tip people off (and yes, this does let them continue to read your mail indefinitely)
- No requirement to safeguard the key once they have it - so if you are a bank, and are forced to hand over your electronic funds transfer key, you may find the local plod's cleaners can pick it up.
- No legal right to appeal (apart from to a closed board not required to publish or justify their decisions) or compensation (there *is* a discressionary compensation scheme, but I suspect if your business loses four or five billion after a competing firm gets details of every bid you put in (and undercuts you by one dollar
:+) you may find they don't think you are entitled to it.
There are just SO MANY reasons why this is wrong and open to abuse - none of which seem to have been considered while drafting it.--
To me, an ISP is a bit like a post (mail) office. If you mail an illegal document to someone, you shouldn't hold the mailman responsiblle for delivering it. It's the same for ISP's - they just deliver.
Unfortunately, the same rules would cover this - if they can get an order to tap your phone, they can get one to open your mail.
--
I agree - the canonical example of this (Microsoft) has been doing this for years, purely on a pricing scale basis. If they suddenly get the legal RIGHT to enforce whatever shrinkwrap they want, don't you think they will grab it with both hands?
But my real concern would be that the legislation could trigger an even greater decline in the quality of shrinkwrapped software.
Yep - if you are not allowed to claim for faulty software costing your business billions, not allowed to even TELL anyone it has done so, and not even entitled to have a set of terms you can sign (as they can vary the terms of your licence at any time) why should they care about software testing? It's not as if the total dismal failure of a firm due to their software's miswritten routines dropping the firm into legal hot water can even be reported...
--
Is expended already - yes, it is reasonable to price your product to cover research costs in x years, and still make a profit, but not quite so reasonable to try and make you pay a premium for features that should be standard. If they weren't making a profit *and* working towards breakeven at the $20 pricepoint, they wouldn't be selling at that price at all. So the price difference of $45 is pure profit - due to what amounts to a lie about how much improvement you are getting over the $20 card.
Should Promise be punished for engineering the card so that it could be modified to be a simple ATA controller? Is their $65 price point exhorbitant?
No, it's a marketing tactic - the Raid controller market is profitable at $65, the Standard ATA controller market wouldn't be, so they sell at $20 - this does'nt mean the $65 is an unreasonable price for that market, it means the market AS A WHOLE is artificially high-priced.
--
To me, the more notable thing is that you can buy a RAID controller for $65... the ability to get it in a clandestine manner for $20 instead is not as interesting, IMHO.
Not really - the point is that the Cheaper card IS the same as the more expensive one, with features disabled so they can charge a higher price for the one with raid. It's not the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last, but they have no reason not to be selling the raid-enabled card for the $20 and forgetting the poor-brother mode one......
--
Unfortunately, the FIRST thing that filtering software blocks is any proxy servers that it knows about - regardless of what you specify to be blocked, it assumes proxy servers are an example of that class and adds them to the banned list.
--
Ugh, the threshold workaround. We had to do this due to (guess what?) a nasty bug with Client32 2.2 and NW 3.11, and it slowed message processing to a real crawl. I seem to remember it working above the PO level, like maybe at the domain level, though. We've banished all those evil revisions to the archive tapes, thankfully.
We didn't find it that bad - on a 400-user-max-postoffice system, admittedly. you may have had much bigger POs to deal with - we had a decent working max as each department had it's own PO, and indeed often it's own server - I always suspected it wouldn't scale well, even if the Novell salesdroids were pushing it as the complete enterprise/wan/gan solution...
--
I can't see why the majority of Net sales should or even CAN be regarded as anything other than Mail Order or Telephone Service sales - obviously dividing this into cases where a good is delivered by post or electronically (online sales of something tangible) as opposed to cases were prices are charged for entertainment or other non-tangible services. Most countries already have policies in place to deal with these cases - why not just apply them???
--
My guess, with what I've known of Windows 9x over these years, is they already had the driver installed once before on that computer. So when it came around this time, it did not need the drivers because Windows already knew they were already there... :+)
In fairness, that scanner was by then well over a year old, and Windows98SE was released in the interim - it is possible it has been added to the standard list of supported devices (given it embarrassed MS before, I suspect they would make DAMNED SURE that there was a working, MS-written driver for it) and if the CABs for those were on the HD, it wouldn't prompt for a floppy.
But I agree - it is probable that the exact hardware setup was tested by adding and removing the scanner several times, and then BG refused to have Windoze reinstalled on the offchance it still didn't work on the night
--
I don't think the caldera client is NDS aware. There's two different things going on... the first is the IPX bit that lets you use a novell server, log in to the server, use its resources. The second is the NDS Tree which allows you to use any resource you have rights to use on the entire LAN (or WAN), which can extend over several servers, or geographical locations.
The Caldera client is a full NW client - including NDS and bindary logins. you may be confusing it with MARS_NWE which emulates a server, but can only manage bindary support (and comes with a login client and an IPX stack for linux)
--
When we ran 4.1 it was a nightmare keeping the database uncorrupted -- clients would FUBAR and then the database would go south, requiring a horrificly slow OFCHECK to get it fixed.
there was a workaround for that - one of the modes was to set threshhold level for post office forwarding. if you set it to 1, you could make the database read-only for users, and they would dump their messages/updates in the local po-server's in queue for it to process
--
I think the main problem here is that Novell's main shrinkwrap product IS NDS - it may be bundled with servers or other software, but when it comes down to it, it is the licences you are paying for (I don't know many organisations that don't have far more netware install cds than they need, but only the licence-key disks they actually use. That's because the CDs are interchangable, and in many cases you are better off using just ONE CD consistantly to avoid revision-changes causing problems during installs to an existing tree). Giving away any more than they have to of their "core" product isn't going to happen. In addition, I am told the majority of their income comes from their training and licencing (CNx programs) and authorised partnerships - paying a substantial fee to gain access to tools and technologies needed to successfully troubleshoot netware installations. If they made too much of their "crown jewels" available, then they would lose much or all of this income.
--
with NDS running on Linux, there will probably be a whole new crop of servers that once ran something proprietary but get replaced with Linux. It happened with Web servers, mail servers, and, to a certain extent, SMB-based fileservers, now it will happen to directory servers. Even if NDS on Linux isn't a free source download (and I'm not holding my breath for that), it must still be cheaper than buying Netware.
Hmm. there is already an IPX/Netware emulator for Linux (similar to the Samba Windoze share emulator) but it is not NDS enabled. I will be interested if the NDS licence allows you to patch this to make an NDS aware MARS server, or even forbids you to run/install a MARS server on the same box.....
--
isn't there already a Caldera NDS client? I always wondered what that was like; it seemed like a great idea when it was first introduced all those years ago.
there is, yes - but it approaches it from the other angle; that of a Linux desktop logging into a NDS server (like a Windoze box does) rather than a Linux server supporting NDS logins.
--
Novell might be better served putting out a commercial version first and then changing over to GPL later...
I can't see the reasoning here - if they are unwilling to run GPL nds, then they are unwilling to run Linux at all. If they are willing to wear linux with a suitable support contract, than (provided redhat is offering support for this) they will still be willing to accept LinuxNDS under the same terms.
--
It was ENTIRELY flatfile-database - so if you could get your client to look at the postoffice, you could connect to and use that postoffice, regardless of platform for either server or client. if you needed to debug, you could manually trace the interchange-flatfiles used for communication between postoffices and/or domains and find the holdups.
Groupwise 5 added document sharing and document storage to the mix, but in MHO breaking the 4.x model and adding tight ties to NDS was one of the worst things ever to happen to the product. Integration modules, yes - but I think that if novell had had a bigger market share, they would have been up on the same stand as Microsoft over that one.......
--
NDS for Solaris has been a product for a while. :-) :+)
Sun support is old news.
I know - but I doubt it will be the same code as the Linux one - particularly after the OSS community get their hands on it and start writing bugfixes and utils tied to the NDS directory structure. I suspect all of this will be Novell's exclusive property to port to other *nix platforms, pending seeing the actual licence used of course
--
More than that - given that NDS has pretty much a consistant user interface, this could easily blur the dividing lines between different server platforms from the viewpoint of Windoze-locked Users - if you logon to a NDS prompt, and get a mapped drive to your home and working directories, email, printers and web access, does it really matter what operating system provides those services?
For those of you that have not experienced the ease of admin dealing with a well designed NDS tree you are really missing out. :+)
Not to mention the deep joy of doing it once, and KNOWING it is done *right*, equally applied to all the servers needed and will be backed up for all eternity next time the tapes spool
--
- Enterprise Level Directory
- Remote Gui tool
- Cross platform
I am sure more reasons will be forthcomingNDS is provably scalable to millions of users on thousands of servers, all centrally managed.
an entire NDS directory can be managed from a windoze workstation (and this is being ported to Java so that Xwindows will be a viable platform too)
NDS can manage your NT, Linux, Workstation and Netware user permissions from one user object, grant printer rights, email accounts, border (internet/wan) routing rights, and a dozen other things (obviously providing these systems are NDS enabled). If you have ever had to set up a new user, or remove a user no longer welcome on your company's premises than you will known what a nightmare this can be to administer quickly.
--
#linux: 0
we will have w2k directory one day... which the ms rep said was better than novell's (embed grain salt) but novell and linux? should be interesting.
I suspect that Linux will be a foothold into NDS for commercial-unix - once LinuxNDS proves stable and reliable, it will be ported to HPUX and sun.....
--
If nothing else, I doubt that M$oft will be handing out Active Directory for Linux anytime soon - and NDS is both better and cross-platform supported.
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I am going to reserve judgement on this one until I see both the code and the licence; Novell have a past history of being as restrictive as they think they can get away with where licencing is concerned; The last thing I imagine anyone would want is for Novell to release this under any of the following:
On the other hand, they HAVE started posting to their website the dev tools that used to be one of their more expensive cashcows, so they *may* be gaining Clue due to MS's competition - we will have to wait and see.
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Even with a standard commercial licence, this is a tremendous step forward - NDS, for all it is a damned expensive way of administering a network, is still the best way I have seen to date. It is stable, cross-platform (and single-login enabling) and can manage almost anything (from remote resources to application licence counting to bandwidth allocation from NDS enabled routers).
However, the company I work for rejected it for NT administration - purely on the pricing structure; for each registered (not concurrent!) user, per server, you had to pay a large NDS licence fee, with obviously the cost of a standard NT user licence on top of that. I would want to see how the new NLS "per user" model is applied to both the Linux and Nt clients - and how much a Server licence for Linux is under this scheme.....
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Hmm. My SUsE cd seems to have a very usable "boot to linux" mode that I have used from time to time.
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