Novell plans to launch at BrainShare 2003 this week the open beta of NetWare 6.5 and update attendees about its Liberty Identity Provider for eDirectory and exteNd 5 Web services platform. The company is expected to announce not only the open-beta availability of NetWare 6.5, code-named Nakoma, but its slated release date of June, sources said. Also, Novell adopts Linux as NetWare migration path.
Novell NetWare 6.5 In Open Beta
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Eugenia Loli
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Being an open source avocate, I am however quite impressed by the quality of Novell operating systems. We are 100% Novel & Linux here, so I am looking forward to merge all the servers and have only 1 OS to maintain!
Having stuffed around with Novell Netware, the one thing I could see, if they wanted to, is adopt a “Linux Base”, similar to FreeBSD’s base of around 200MB, then Novell builds onto of the base a good management tool, port their eDirectory software across and generally speaking turn it into the little battler with a opensource core and a value added layer.
In the second article it mentioned a Java based Groupwise client. HINT HINT LOTUS WAKE UP PORT TO *NIX! I hope they heard it through the metres of red tape IBM rap them in. Have you ever tried to get in contact with any one at lotus? no wonder most people can’t be bothered even contacting them.
That they didn’t do this sooner. I guess they wanted to go out with a bang!
Actually, you can already install eDirectory on Linux…
The whole philosophy of Novell has been open, interoperable network architectures. All the way to the clients.
With NetWare and eDirectory you can consolidate Unix, Linux, Windows NT domains and Win2000 Active Directrories under one, centraly manageable yet distributed umbrella. Not only is this possible because of eDirectory, which will include all this stuff as objects (of various type, depending on the source), but also because NetWare deals so well with Unix and network protocols of all kinds.
Novell’s phylosophy was always to allow the customer to chose the best tool for the job (Unix, WinNT, OS/2, IBM AS/400, NetWare, Mac) while helping to administer a heterogeneous network. No lock-in.
I seriously hope they fix the speed of their netware clients. I’d rather use Linux over Novell any day. Sorry, I just can’t stand Novell.
…pioneers of the 64MB (real RAM at that) footprinted client.
Not to mention, it’s 2003 and they STILL support IPX. Time to get with the times, to hell with the ludites still running IPX.
Before writing drivers for chips, I was a net admin. In 1999, with a 400MHz Pentium II, a Novell Netware server with 160MB/s SCSI channels could saturate a 100Mbit/s connection. NT couldn’t. Linux couldn’t. Same box. I know Linux still can’t, but I am guessing that NT has improved somewhat with better processors (NT has a very nice IO architecture).
Linux works very reliably, but its free, and you don’t get alot fast code on it (or in it, as the case may be). And don’t let this positive linux comment spill over to having anything to do with Linux desktop…
like secure (unbreakable, actually) authentication, application delivery, encrypted communication, SNMP, advanced autoreconnect… Of course, you probably don’t need all the features, so you can optimize the client during installation. The good news is, you can automate this preconfigured installation. check this out:
http://asia.cnet.com/itmanager/netadmin/0,39006400,39114574-2,00.ht…
not only the second page, the whole article is very informative and well written:
http://asia.cnet.com/itmanager/netadmin/0,39006400,39114574,00.htm
I was a net admin. In 1999, with a 400MHz Pentium II, a Novell Netware server with 160MB/s SCSI channels could saturate a 100Mbit/s connection. NT couldn’t. Linux couldn’t. Same box.
Eh? I doubt /any/ of those operating systems would have trouble saturating a poxy 100Mbits link on that hardware. I know for a fact that neither NT nor Linux did in 1999.
A Gbit connection. maybe? But a 100Mbit connection? *laff*
i dont know about now, but i do know that in 1999 novell was by far the fastest file and print server OS for the small to medium business.
as for saturating a 100mbit link… well that one depends upon alot of other factors, but nt servers at the time definately felt ALOT slower than novell servers from an end user perspective. i dont know if it was due to the scsi drivers or the nic drivers or what, but the perceived speed difference was noticeable. nowdays im not sure it matters as much given the power of modern hardware and improvements with modern drivers. i know of an 800 mhz 2k server that can saturate 3 100mbit clients (server has a gigabit card, tested through a dell managed switch with gigabit and 100mbit ports, we only had 3 machines to use as clients at the time we tested it. by saturate we mean measured throughput at >= 10MB/s throughout the entire test)
I don’t know about anyone else, but as far I’m concerned I would throw NT out the window (pun intended) and use Netware as the backend for all my storage infrastructure: 32 nodes in a cluster (windows 2 nodes); 32 processors support out of the box, Multipathing built in to the OS ( the only other OS i know is VMS), strong SAN storage features built in, support for ISCSI, snapshots, etc. The main thing is W2K is lousy at cluster support, to add a disk resource one must bring down at some point both nodes. In netware you just mount the volume… I don’t understand why more people don’t see that NW is superior in many ways to other OSes