A press release announces that Novell is offering a new Native File Access Pack that allows Windows, Mac OS, and UNIX/Linux clients to access Netware servers without any special Novell client software. This is a big step in the right direction for Novell. Using the standard file-sharing protocols for each of the three major workstation platforms makes Netware a stronger competitor to other file servers. And administrators who’ve disliked adding more software to every workstation just so they can connect to Netware servers now have one less reason to switch their server OS. An Infoworld review of a beta release of Netware 6 gives some more detail.
Finally news about Netware 6! Sounds very interesting. I look forward to seeing how the market reacts to it when it’s released.
Very cool! I mean, the fact that osnews has picked it up. I don’t know how NetWare will be able to accomplish this, though. I mean, if you want to mount NFS shares on a Win95/98/ME/NT computer, you need to install some PC_NFS software. Likewise, if you want to mount SMB disks, you need to install Samba on Linux or UNIX. Just as well, you need to have some software that allows for name resolution in a NetWare environment (which is solved by Netbios, in windows, natively). So, I don’t know, sounds almost impossible, without having something on the client side, even if lighteight and tiny.
On the other side, NetWare has always been known to cooperate well with Unix, DEC, Windows and Mac, due to their effort to prodice client software, transport protocls (Appletalk, DECnet, TCP/IP), filesystem services and name spaces that support all of the more or less popular business platforms. It has always been an open system.
CIFS is not that hard. Most of the specs are publicly available & there are reference implementations like samba to look at.
I’m not sure what’s harder, server or client. Samba does the server mainly while clients are tied to the internals of the OS.
We’ve managed to do a CIFS (SMB) client for petros which runs fairly smoothly. We need to tweak a few things like adding opportunistic locks & local caching, but even without it, performance is reasonable. Of course if you application reads & writes to the file in tiny bits, performance drops. I was surprised to find a few apps like that. We also need to finish the browsing functions so you don’t have to fool around with DNS or LMHOSTS files, but that doesn’t look too hard.
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In my opinion, the NetWare client is the biggest reason to dislike NetWare. NetWare is shloads better than NT, and NFAP puts it over the top by allowing me to dump the client(hoorah).
While this feature of NetWare 6 is great, there are at least 20 other new features that are even better. I had a chance to look at the NetWare 6 Beta. NetWare 6 is going to be awesome.