Novell Vice Chairman Chris Stone says the company will keep its flagship operating system in maintenance mode as it gears up for Linux.
Making a decision on NetWare’s future
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Later, they said that this guy’s comments were taken out of context and that Netware is still alive for further development.
See the recent slashdot story at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/07/2253243&mode=nested&tid…
This linked story above is equally new as Slashdot’s (8th August). We have reported on Netware’s fate too, twice: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=4219 but it seems that there is some uncertainty coming out from different people.
Linux is the future. This is just another step going in the free direction. Microsoft will loose in the end!
After supporting Novell Netware for 6+ years in a sizable enterprise environment … I can say that they should make the switch and never look back. Netware is crufty, fragile, and what few application services it can run, it runs like dog shit. Thank god I just deal with routers and linux now.
Besides, this is no big surprise. Novels boat has been sinking for a long time now. They should have done this a long time ago with a closed source model on top of FreeBSD ( ala Mac OSX ). Would have allowed them to keep more of thier IP by closing the source on thier kernel integrated pieces. Now they will have to GPL the inlayed parts.
The real shame is that free *nix doesn’t have a real directory service of thier own ( and don’t say openldap, its a toy ) to tie services into. Then we would all just laugh when novel made press releases like this and go about our buisness.
-Matthew
When’s the last time you used NetWare? What version? NetWatre has come a LONG way. It runs entirely in IP now, and it’s 1000 times times better than Windows. In fact, IMHO, NDS blows away Linux and Windows directory and resource authentication solutions.
Novell is one of the most stable OS’s out there. I would use linux first, but I have to admit that Novell is one HELL of an OS. There’s just too much competition now. It’ll go the way of the oldsmobile or whatever car just got discontinued. And while I salute netware, it’s not great tragedy. A shame maybe, but it’s just an OS, it’s not a human life or even like a really really old tree with people living in it so it doesn’t get cut down.
And dot com deaths will follow as many freeze to death in the cold boring penguinland.
I can imagine Apple is getting happy about things now… they obviously sit on the only option to MS and with the Linux hype, people might get up their eyes for what exists on the market.
And since Linux is a one timer, try once you never choose Linux again, Macs might see a lot bigger market share soon
By Egil.B (IP: —.80-202-196.nextgentel.com) – Posted on 2003-08-08 22:28:33
Linux is the future.
I sure hope not!
There are other OS:es that are more technically elegant.
This is just another step going in the free direction. Microsoft will loose in the end!
See that is the problem with Linux fanboys. It is all about MS and using Linux as a weapon against MS. It is not about OS diversity. We need OS diversity and open standards NOT a new OS monopoly to replace MS with. We need “Free” BeOS:es, BSD:s, Plan 9:ers, Windows, OS X:es Linuxes and Hurds to mention just a few. Diversity drives evolution and development and I am saddened to see many Linuxbackers ignoring this fact.
We need MS just as we need Apple and LSF. Linux is still (most unfortunately) years behind Windows and MacOS (and BeOS too for that part) on the WIMP desktop for ordinary Joes and Janes. Geeks like us handle it easily but the rest… many of them who can hardly use even Mac OS or Windows efficiently.
Love the freedom of Linux and BSDs but know that diversity will benefit us all in the long run.
I’ve got a special place in my heart for netware. Netware was the first server os I ever learned, and I had a lot of fun with it. It was fairly buggy until v5 came count, but NDS was amazing. Although, the one thing about NDS is you can shoot your self in the foot very easily, and if you get hacked someone can hide entire ous from the admins. Never really liked that. Linux will be a good for novell to go, netware was getting dated.d
I can imagine Apple is getting happy about things now… they obviously sit on the only option to MS and with the Linux hype, people might get up their eyes for what exists on the market.
Apple is the only option to MS? Yuck. Maybe I’ll just go back to using my old C64 instead, or go find a typewriter somewhere. OSX just doesn’t do it for me.
I’m not a Linux fanboy.
What’s interesting about these kinds of stories is that these are commercial developers supporting Linux, not communists or free software advocates. This isn’t payback, get-evenism, or simple hatred for Microsoft. This appears to be the best model for competing, or surviving against Microsoft’s monopoly power.
Technical superiority, higher quality, and innovation are not enough to compete with Microsoft’s ability to bundle, give away, and lock out. Other vendors are being driven to support free software. Makes sense doesn’t it? They can charge for custom solutions and for support. The overall Linux code-base does not depend on market share for survival, and Microsoft can not acquire it or put it out of business.
I appreciate that these companies may find a way to compete with Microsoft, but I still see Redmond as having the advantage. With their near lock on the desktop, they are empowered to develop technologies like .Net, which is oblivious to the existence of non-Microsoft developed clients. The burden is on everyone else to try to develop interoperability with Microsoft’s closed sofware.
Netware is not elegant but it works and works rather well.
In fact I find Netware rather ugly and unintutitive. It was an OS you REALLY had to learn.
But I have also seen it withstand a lot. It was a tought little OS.
Everything ran in memory so I could do a lot without taking down the machine. On a NW 3.2 machine I was able to unmount the system drive, repair it and remount it without having the reboot and not loosing the shared drives for the clients on the network. Sorry but I don’t see Linux, Windows, MacOSX able to do that.
I had some backup software die and I totally lost access to the machine, but the shared drives lever lost and I was able to leave everything alone till after hours and I could reboot the box.
Problem with Netware was the price. Made windows look cheap and you didn’t get the support you get from Microsoft. Not that you get much support from MS, but you got more in my opinion.
I think if Netware got off their high horse and get pricing in line then people would go back to it.
I wonder how many of you actually know what in the crap you are talking about. I currently use NetWare 6 and I am beta testing NetWare 6.5. The OS is not another cookie cutter version of UNIX. Yes, there is a bit of a learning curve, but it actually was way easier than Windows or any UNIX flavor. It was not super elegant, the focus of the design was always on building an industrial strength OS. It wasn’t until Windows NT that admins cared about what backgrounds their server had and what pretty statistical pictures they could pull directly from the OS, personally I would rather just use SNMP. Oh yes, and you can make the server talk to you when it starts and change the background… hey, install WebShots…Seems like a step backward to me. But that was the beginning of the end for most applications on NetWare.
All of the Netware NLMs (applications on NetWare) run without a hitch (as long as you are running with correct versions and your files are corrupted). All of the NLMs run in memory, you can rename NLMs or even delete them while they are running. Makes it really, really nice for disaster recovery, I cant say this enough. When the NLMs are well written, NetWare can be up for years at a time (not an exaggeration.)
The are several weaknesses in NetWare however, one is that its scheduler uses cooperative multi-tasking and only has a “pseudo” pre-emptive mode. Badly written NLMs can wreak havoc on a NetWare server. Another is that applications and the kernel share the same memory space, plus it doesn’t have a thread model that would work with POSIX thread libraries. You can set-aside memory space, but more often than not it is problematic. Novell was working on a major re-work to the kernel and OS C libraries, however (more than likely) the pure power of Linux (buzz word mania) is more mportant than the actual ability of a product in this case. NetWare will probably end up dying like so many other OSs.
In response to Linux not having a free-ware version of NDS, my response is good. At least some programmers are getting paid. Plus NDS is not really meant to sit on one platform, it already runs on Linux (as well as NetWare, Solaris, and Windows.)
Also, in response to the NDS security comment – if there were problems with NDS security (containers blocking supervisor through IRF), it was because of internal security problems or bad security design, not NDS. Being able to lock someone out of a container is necessary in certain extreme circumstances (I have only heard of government agencies needing this, but maybe R&D would qualify?) and it is not a trivial task.
Q) When’s the last time you used NetWare?
A) My organization still uses netware and groupwise to this day. And although I do not directly support the os directly anymore ( thank god ), I do rely on directory services for a lot of integrated services.
Q) What version? NetWatre has come a LONG way. It runs entirely in IP now
A) A mixture of 5.x and the latest and greatest. Of course it does. IPX doesnt scale for shit.
>, and it’s 1000 times times better than Windows.
>In fact, IMHO, NDS blows away Linux and Windows directory >and resource authentication solutions.
Im not a big fan of windows. But cooperative multi tasking along with a bad memory model puts netware right up there with Windows for Workgroups as far as OS technology goes.
Right, NDS is great ( when you don’t have strange random sync issues from that latest ds.nlm you loaded that was supposed to fix some other problem you were having ). And yes, directory services are the only way to manage enterprise network resources. ( thanks Banyan Vines! ) Active directory is catching up though. But thats not really the point now is it.
So you have kick ass file and print sharing. But people expect a bit more than that these days. Application services suck on Netware OS … period … end of story. Why else do you think Novells market has dropped like a Lez Zepplin the last decade. You can do more on win32 ( sad but true ) and Novell let them do it.
BTW … Exactly how many megabytes of software is required to attach a workstation to a fileserver these days?
http://download.novell.com/filedist/ctrl?_app=download&_step=downlo…