First of all, we made the decision to block Napster when our T1 became unusable. We're adding a second T1 soon, but the characteristics of what happens when Napster is used would cause the same saturation. Another reason is that all of our students sign a network agreement that prohibits running servers (which is what a computer running Napster is) and also prohibits the use of excessive amounts of network bandwidth for extended periods of time, which clearly was happening. There's not a lot of wiggle room here. I've got (and will always have) a finite pipe to the Internet, and if one thing is filling it disproportionately, I'm not meeting the needs of my user community if I allow that to happen.
The other big issue about Napster that I haven't seen anyone mention in detail is that this is a COMPANY, with a lot of venture capital, forcing a closed (reverse-engineered, certainly) music distribution system on an unwitting public. Their revenue model is dependent on having a system that creates a large, distributed music library, that someone will think is worth buying. I have little faith that the Napster team has any interest in designing their software to limit bandwith use on its own, or shut itself off automatically or anything like that (the behavior of the Windows client where hitting the "X" doesn't really close the program is evidence of that.) Their existence and what they're selling requires as many people be on as possible, and in fact, that the people with large music collections be on very fast, unrestricted links, which right now means universities. Basically, the very foundation of the company depends on a big music library be available on very fast links, on bandwidth that is not theirs, and that other people are paying for.
One final thing to consider is that we're all complaining about Real and what it did, but Napster has the largest catalog of what MP3s are on whose computers. Such information is a marketing bonanza, and that may be the main reason for Napster's existence. They may not be doing it yet, but really, how long can that go on? This company will need to make money, and probably soon. At that point, the same people screaming for their "freedom" from "censorship" will be screaming about the unauthorized use of their personal information. I can't wait.
This is not a case of the wholesome, righteous freedom fighters defending the rights of the little guy--this is a company seeking to make a buck on the backs of others.
You right now have two options for NDS support in Linux, in terms of file/print: the Caldera NDS client (you can download the RPM from Caldera, and the nkfs kernel module and compile it for your kernel, and it may work.) and ncpfs, which is really quite good and very open.
On the NetWare side, you can run NFS for NetWare, but it isn't the cleanest implementation, and you can also do Unix-style printing as of NetWare 5.0 (set up NDS print queues that point to Unix print queues, and I believe go the other way) and also in 4.11 with add-on products.
Novell is probably better for Windows desktop management than any other product out there, including Microsoft's. ZEN Works is an amazing piece of software, and with NDS behind it it works very well.
Of course, what people are saying about NDS is true. Remember, NDS is more than an LDAP provider--the "A" in LDAP is "Access", and although you can do LDAP replication, NDS's strength is that it does replication and consistency better than any other directory product. They've been doing this for 10 years.
Actually, Novell just made a press release about open-source LDAP support--check here for some details.
I also know Novell has contributed a port of Apache to NetWare 5.1 to the Apache Group, and is releasing (closed source) NDS for Linux.
I guess Microsoft's done the ActivePerl stuff, and maybe some help with Samba (I don't know.) However, they've backed away from AD support on any non-MS system, and certainly have made no open source announcements about AD.
My point is is that both of these companies will respond to open source. Of course, I'd think Novell has more to gain/lose, so they're likely to be more agressive, while Microsoft is still in the "crush our competitors" analogy.
Well, in the Unix world, you could say NDS is a big LDAP server. But it's not.
NDS is a incredibly well-designed, stable, reliable directory service. You can store just about anything in a directory service. With NDS, we have network users, groups, servers, volumes, applications (distributed with ZEN to our desktops.) and configuration info for various programs. You can access the directory with NCP calls with Novell clients, or now with LDAP, both pretty efficiently. There have been some DS bugs, like there are in anything, but we've been running the same DS tree for 5 years without having to restore the entire system, or even any part of the tree, from a backup. Mind you, in that time we've added or replaced every server originally in the tree, and at no time was the tree itself unavailable.
In many ways, there's no analog in the Unix world to what you can do with NDS. It's kinda like NIS or NIS+, but much more refined. I get sick and tired about hearing how people do password and account synchronization between Unix boxes, or between NT domains--NDS just works, at least to all your NetWare boxes, as well as NT (4 and 2K in domain mode,) and Solaris, with Compaq Unix and Linux in a few months. I can set up my Unix boxes to auth to the NDS tree--I don't need/etc/passwd entries for anyone (but root) if I don't want. Unix GECOS info is stored in properties of the NDS User object, and NDS groups can have UNIX group info. Also I've done some authentication and checking passwords against LDAP with great success.
I think Novell's problem is that it's fundamentally difficult to advertise and market a directory. Unless you're a geek trying to manage a large organization (> 1000 computers and users, say,) it's hard to understand how useful and powerful a good directory really is. Active Directory is a hack to reduce the complexities of transitive domain trusts, and not much more. NDS is a solid, real directory that you can use for anything, that works now (it's been in production for nearly a decade--and yes, it wasn't very pretty when NetWare 4 first came out, but they've really gotten it right.)
Actually, I've seen other sources report that Novell's open-sourcing their digitalme technology, which is based on NDS.
I can also see Novell open-sourcing some but not all of their NDS for {Solaris|Linux} material--perhaps the PAM module, perhaps a file-sharing component (which Novell doesn't really have--there's a client that Caldera and SCO use which I believe is originally Novell code, but it's in desparate need of updating, and open sourcing it, or perhaps giving a boost to the ncpfs developers, would be a boon.)
I don't see Novell completely opening NDS--it's their bread and butter. I could be wrong though...
All I can say is that eDirectory on Linux will be a great thing for us Novell shops who want to play with things like LDAP on Linux (we're already doing some fun things with it, and this would make it so much better.)
I know some laser fusion experiments have reached "scientific breakeven"--ie, the amount of energy inputted to start the fusion reaction is equal to the energy output of the fusion. Laser fusion is shooting a bunch of lasers at a deuterium pellet, compressing it and getting it to fuse. Scientific breakeven is neat, but doesn't cut the mustard, since you're not including the energy needed to fire the lasers and charge the capacitors that are the size of buildings, which is many orders of magnitude above the laser energy. So we've still got a way to go there.
And there's no violation of the laws of physics here--fusion is just the liberation of nuclear bond energy, energy that manifests itself as mass in the stable atoms. The trick is you need energy to get it to happen, and the goal is to create a stable fusion reaction to generate power continuously, which is the tricky part.
You could put NDS for Linux on all your Linux servers, and run an NDS tree without a single NetWare server, and probably install at least the application management portion of ZEN to NDS and use it just fine, but the client side depends on an NDS login, which usually wants a Novell server to map drives to, and to run the ZEN client utilites from. NDS for Linux has no NCP file sharing capability built in (it's not a replacement for either mars-nwe or ncpfs, it's just tools to run the NDS replicas on a Linux box, and provide nsswitch an PAM to the OS so authentication can be against NDS.)
With some playing, you could probably get the ZEN client files on a Samba share, or even a mars-nwe thing, or, if it was more modern, the Caldera NetWare for Linux product, but the latter is almost certainly not compatible with NDS for Linux (the DS versions are way off.) Ooh, ooh, Samba should be able to use NDS for Linux's PAM auth just fine, so you'd have a single password solution for drive mounting...
You're going to have to do a lot of work no matter what. I'm really fascinated though by the idea, and may throw some resources at it in my spare time.
One we're using is classic video games (we have tempest, digdug, pengo, qix.)
Another I wanted to do was cities animated series are set in. I've come up with Bedrock, Springfield, Quahog, Arlen, New New York, and then my brain shuts off.
In the past I've used heroes/gods of the forest, Dr. Seuss references, fantasy lands, and subatomic particles (when I was a physics grad student.)
Novell made an announcement about digitalme (http://www.digitalme.com) about a week before the Microsoft announcement. Digitalme seems similar, except it's not demanding your billing information, and it's designed to let you control what parts of yourself you want to share with whom. And it's using their directory services to do it. I have no idea what Microsoft's backend is. Overall, Novell's concept seems less creepy.
Novell's also talking about freely releasing some of the digitalme tools--of course, you'll need Novell stuff to do it, but it's a start...
The idea we had in mind is that you'd use something like Shoutcast as the distribution medium, hook your computer up to the Net and the audio out to your low power FM equipment, and rebroadcast someone else's programming.
There's lots of questions here:
1) If I went through all the trouble to buy, install, run, and maintain low power equipment, would I want to use it just to rebroadcast someone else's material? I probably wouldn't just keep it tuned to one shoutcast channel, I might pick and choose what I transmit from the mix, or become a "shoutcast syndicator" where I play other people's programming at other times.
2) I could see this becoming a great way to do an internet call-in show, or some talk show, where people could call in, or submit questions over the Net, and people could listen on their computers or on their radios if they knew where to do so.
3) There are legality issues--I think that most of the people running shoutcast servers (unless they're already bona-fide radio stations) aren't paying ASCAP/BMI royalties, and although I haven't heard that either of them are looking for it, they probably would think they have a right to royalties if this got big enough (they did try to get bars and restaurants to pay, after all,) or, ASCAP and BMI may not care about Shoutcast, but would care if those signals were broadcasted over low power FM. If you're doing all unsigned indie bands, or talk programming, you can avoid royalty fees. And ASCAP/BMI royalties would apply for the low-power broadcaster playing their own CD collections, as well.
I guess we were mainly ruminating on the prospects of using current Internet audio distribution technology as a way to network low power FM stations, or as a programming source, and what the legal, and technical, ramifications would be.
I hope it does. NetWare for Linux was a cool product when it first came out, but Novell moved beyond it very quickly. It's pretty much unusable in a NetWare 5 environment.
NDS for Linux will be where it's at--at least in terms of authentication and LDAP support. However, it won't have the client access like the Caldera client (and there is an RPM for the Caldera nwclient in the 2.3 distro, and it's newer than the latest beta on their FTP site. Haven't tried it out yet, though.)
Novell's Internet Messaging System (IMS) is basically a a complete rewrite of the Netscape Messaging Server, ported to NetWare as well. If you're an NDS shop, it's very nice. I'm testing it now, and I haven't given it serious load, but it's frighteningly responsive on a P150 w/96MB of RAM running NetWare 5. There will be Solaris and Linux versions by the end of the year. It's not open source, or free, though--it's being geared towards large ISPs. They've tested it with millions of messages a day on a single box. It comes with a built in Web mail agent that is the fastest I've ever seen, and supports POP and IMAP, and it's its own SMTP server and MTA. The people doing it are really interested in standards compliance, and making it work well with everything. Frequently that's not how you describe Novell...
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First of all, we made the decision to block Napster when our T1 became unusable. We're adding a second T1 soon, but the characteristics of what happens when Napster is used would cause the same saturation. Another reason is that all of our students sign a network agreement that prohibits running servers (which is what a computer running Napster is) and also prohibits the use of excessive amounts of network bandwidth for extended periods of time, which clearly was happening. There's not a lot of wiggle room here. I've got (and will always have) a finite pipe to the Internet, and if one thing is filling it disproportionately, I'm not meeting the needs of my user community if I allow that to happen.
The other big issue about Napster that I haven't seen anyone mention in detail is that this is a COMPANY, with a lot of venture capital, forcing a closed (reverse-engineered, certainly) music distribution system on an unwitting public. Their revenue model is dependent on having a system that creates a large, distributed music library, that someone will think is worth buying. I have little faith that the Napster team has any interest in designing their software to limit bandwith use on its own, or shut itself off automatically or anything like that (the behavior of the Windows client where hitting the "X" doesn't really close the program is evidence of that.) Their existence and what they're selling requires as many people be on as possible, and in fact, that the people with large music collections be on very fast, unrestricted links, which right now means universities. Basically, the very foundation of the company depends on a big music library be available on very fast links, on bandwidth that is not theirs, and that other people are paying for.
One final thing to consider is that we're all complaining about Real and what it did, but Napster has the largest catalog of what MP3s are on whose computers. Such information is a marketing bonanza, and that may be the main reason for Napster's existence. They may not be doing it yet, but really, how long can that go on? This company will need to make money, and probably soon. At that point, the same people screaming for their "freedom" from "censorship" will be screaming about the unauthorized use of their personal information. I can't wait.
This is not a case of the wholesome, righteous freedom fighters defending the rights of the little guy--this is a company seeking to make a buck on the backs of others.
--Mike
On the NetWare side, you can run NFS for NetWare, but it isn't the cleanest implementation, and you can also do Unix-style printing as of NetWare 5.0 (set up NDS print queues that point to Unix print queues, and I believe go the other way) and also in 4.11 with add-on products.
Novell is probably better for Windows desktop management than any other product out there, including Microsoft's. ZEN Works is an amazing piece of software, and with NDS behind it it works very well.
Of course, what people are saying about NDS is true. Remember, NDS is more than an LDAP provider--the "A" in LDAP is "Access", and although you can do LDAP replication, NDS's strength is that it does replication and consistency better than any other directory product. They've been doing this for 10 years.
I also know Novell has contributed a port of Apache to NetWare 5.1 to the Apache Group, and is releasing (closed source) NDS for Linux.
I guess Microsoft's done the ActivePerl stuff, and maybe some help with Samba (I don't know.) However, they've backed away from AD support on any non-MS system, and certainly have made no open source announcements about AD.
My point is is that both of these companies will respond to open source. Of course, I'd think Novell has more to gain/lose, so they're likely to be more agressive, while Microsoft is still in the "crush our competitors" analogy.
Well, in the Unix world, you could say NDS is a big LDAP server. But it's not.
/etc/passwd entries for anyone (but root) if I don't want. Unix GECOS info is stored in properties of the NDS User object, and NDS groups can have UNIX group info. Also I've done some authentication and checking passwords against LDAP with great success.
NDS is a incredibly well-designed, stable, reliable directory service. You can store just about anything in a directory service. With NDS, we have network users, groups, servers, volumes, applications (distributed with ZEN to our desktops.) and configuration info for various programs. You can access the directory with NCP calls with Novell clients, or now with LDAP, both pretty efficiently. There have been some DS bugs, like there are in anything, but we've been running the same DS tree for 5 years without having to restore the entire system, or even any part of the tree, from a backup. Mind you, in that time we've added or replaced every server originally in the tree, and at no time was the tree itself unavailable.
In many ways, there's no analog in the Unix world to what you can do with NDS. It's kinda like NIS or NIS+, but much more refined. I get sick and tired about hearing how people do password and account synchronization between Unix boxes, or between NT domains--NDS just works, at least to all your NetWare boxes, as well as NT (4 and 2K in domain mode,) and Solaris, with Compaq Unix and Linux in a few months. I can set up my Unix boxes to auth to the NDS tree--I don't need
I think Novell's problem is that it's fundamentally difficult to advertise and market a directory. Unless you're a geek trying to manage a large organization (> 1000 computers and users, say,) it's hard to understand how useful and powerful a good directory really is. Active Directory is a hack to reduce the complexities of transitive domain trusts, and not much more. NDS is a solid, real directory that you can use for anything, that works now (it's been in production for nearly a decade--and yes, it wasn't very pretty when NetWare 4 first came out, but they've really gotten it right.)
Actually, I've seen other sources report that Novell's open-sourcing their digitalme technology, which is based on NDS.
I can also see Novell open-sourcing some but not all of their NDS for {Solaris|Linux} material--perhaps the PAM module, perhaps a file-sharing component (which Novell doesn't really have--there's a client that Caldera and SCO use which I believe is originally Novell code, but it's in desparate need of updating, and open sourcing it, or perhaps giving a boost to the ncpfs developers, would be a boon.)
I don't see Novell completely opening NDS--it's their bread and butter. I could be wrong though...
All I can say is that eDirectory on Linux will be a great thing for us Novell shops who want to play with things like LDAP on Linux (we're already doing some fun things with it, and this would make it so much better.)
--Mike
I know some laser fusion experiments have reached "scientific breakeven"--ie, the amount of energy inputted to start the fusion reaction is equal to the energy output of the fusion. Laser fusion is shooting a bunch of lasers at a deuterium pellet, compressing it and getting it to fuse. Scientific breakeven is neat, but doesn't cut the mustard, since you're not including the energy needed to fire the lasers and charge the capacitors that are the size of buildings, which is many orders of magnitude above the laser energy. So we've still got a way to go there.
And there's no violation of the laws of physics here--fusion is just the liberation of nuclear bond energy, energy that manifests itself as mass in the stable atoms. The trick is you need energy to get it to happen, and the goal is to create a stable fusion reaction to generate power continuously, which is the tricky part.
You could put NDS for Linux on all your Linux servers, and run an NDS tree without a single NetWare server, and probably install at least the application management portion of ZEN to NDS and use it just fine, but the client side depends on an NDS login, which usually wants a Novell server to map drives to, and to run the ZEN client utilites from. NDS for Linux has no NCP file sharing capability built in (it's not a replacement for either mars-nwe or ncpfs, it's just tools to run the NDS replicas on a Linux box, and provide nsswitch an PAM to the OS so authentication can be against NDS.)
With some playing, you could probably get the ZEN client files on a Samba share, or even a mars-nwe thing, or, if it was more modern, the Caldera NetWare for Linux product, but the latter is almost certainly not compatible with NDS for Linux (the DS versions are way off.) Ooh, ooh, Samba should be able to use NDS for Linux's PAM auth just fine, so you'd have a single password solution for drive mounting...
You're going to have to do a lot of work no matter what. I'm really fascinated though by the idea, and may throw some resources at it in my spare time.
--Mike
One we're using is classic video games (we have tempest, digdug, pengo, qix.)
Another I wanted to do was cities animated series are set in. I've come up with Bedrock, Springfield, Quahog, Arlen, New New York, and then my brain shuts off.
In the past I've used heroes/gods of the forest, Dr. Seuss references, fantasy lands, and subatomic particles (when I was a physics grad student.)
Novell made an announcement about digitalme (http://www.digitalme.com) about a week before the Microsoft announcement. Digitalme seems similar, except it's not demanding your billing information, and it's designed to let you control what parts of yourself you want to share with whom. And it's using their directory services to do it. I have no idea what Microsoft's backend is. Overall, Novell's concept seems less creepy.
Novell's also talking about freely releasing some of the digitalme tools--of course, you'll need Novell stuff to do it, but it's a start...
The idea we had in mind is that you'd use something like Shoutcast as the distribution medium, hook your computer up to the Net and the audio out to your low power FM equipment, and rebroadcast someone else's programming.
There's lots of questions here:
1) If I went through all the trouble to buy, install, run, and maintain low power equipment, would I want to use it just to rebroadcast someone else's material? I probably wouldn't just keep it tuned to one shoutcast channel, I might pick and choose what I transmit from the mix, or become a "shoutcast syndicator" where I play other people's programming at other times.
2) I could see this becoming a great way to do an internet call-in show, or some talk show, where people could call in, or submit questions over the Net, and people could listen on their computers or on their radios if they knew where to do so.
3) There are legality issues--I think that most of the people running shoutcast servers (unless they're already bona-fide radio stations) aren't paying ASCAP/BMI royalties, and although I haven't heard that either of them are looking for it, they probably would think they have a right to royalties if this got big enough (they did try to get bars and restaurants to pay, after all,) or, ASCAP and BMI may not care about Shoutcast, but would care if those signals were broadcasted over low power FM. If you're doing all unsigned indie bands, or talk programming, you can avoid royalty fees. And ASCAP/BMI royalties would apply for the low-power broadcaster playing their own CD collections, as well.
I guess we were mainly ruminating on the prospects of using current Internet audio distribution technology as a way to network low power FM stations, or as a programming source, and what the legal, and technical, ramifications would be.
--Mike
Thank you! This is more like it! I am impressed that you got it off of Caldera's site at all--it seems to be completely down at this point.
I hope it does. NetWare for Linux was a cool product when it first came out, but Novell moved beyond it very quickly. It's pretty much unusable in a NetWare 5 environment.
NDS for Linux will be where it's at--at least in terms of authentication and LDAP support. However, it won't have the client access like the Caldera client (and there is an RPM for the Caldera nwclient in the 2.3 distro, and it's newer than the latest beta on their FTP site. Haven't tried it out yet, though.)
ncpfs is also worth looking atl...
Novell's Internet Messaging System (IMS) is basically a a complete rewrite of the Netscape Messaging Server, ported to NetWare as well. If you're an NDS shop, it's very nice. I'm testing it now, and I haven't given it serious load, but it's frighteningly responsive on a P150 w/96MB of RAM running NetWare 5. There will be Solaris and Linux versions by the end of the year. It's not open source, or free, though--it's being geared towards large ISPs. They've tested it with millions of messages a day on a single box. It comes with a built in Web mail agent that is the fastest I've ever seen, and supports POP and IMAP, and it's its own SMTP server and MTA.
The people doing it are really interested in standards compliance, and making it work well with everything. Frequently that's not how you describe Novell...