With OES 2.0, Novell Moves NetWare To Linux

apokryphos writes "Novell's long journey from NetWare to Linux is finally complete, with Open Enterprise Server 2.0. Linux-Watch takes a look at the newly-released OES 2.0: 'Now, with OES 2.0, the NetWare operating system kernel, NetWare 6.5 SP7, is still there if you run it, but it runs on top of the Xen hypervisor. You can also run the NetWare services, or a para-virtualized instance of NetWare, on top of Xen with the SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) 10 SP 1 kernel. So, if you're wedded to NetWare and its way of doing things, you don't have to wave good-bye to it.'"

Re:Skeptical

[BitZtream]

Part of the reason netware hasn't seen drastic changes recently is because it was doing directory services and things like that for years. A lot of the 'neat' stuff that everyone else is doing now was there in netware 4, now its more of the same using protocols that are much closer to public standards, like ldap for the directory services, smtp support for mail, ect. There are plenty more things like this but I'm too lazy to go get a feature list and point them out. :)

Personally, I can't stand netware. But, the did a lot of the good stuff way before MS or Sun picked up on the concepts, hence they haven't had a major reason to make any massive changes. In case you haven't noticed, Unix, linux included, hasn't had any massive redesigns in the past 10 years either. Its all just minor updates to things along as needed to cope with new hardware technologies.

Re:Skeptical

[nip1024]

The Novell platform has changed a great deal in the last decade. I've been a Systems Engineer for 15 years in large and small companies and have had to deal with just about every server OS out there. So far Netware is still the one I would choose for most applications. Linux is just now getting to the point where I would consider them before Novell. Microsoft Windows doesn't even come close to the stability or security I want and Active Directory is a joke. I've worked with Netware servers that have never been shutdown or rebooted for the entire lifetime of the system they were on (over 3 years). I have yet to see a Windows server that didn't need to be rebooted several times a year.

For comparison, one company I worked for had 3000 users, 280 servers and about 3600 workstations/laptops. They were a Windows shop and had over 180 full-time IT personnel. Another organization I worked with, though not for, had 1800 users, 40 servers and about 2200 workstations/laptops but they were a Novell shop. They had better service uptime (email/file/print/web) and faster workstation services (break/fix/moves/upgrades) and were able to do it with less than 25 IT people.

Novell networks are easier to maintain, more secure and much more stable than a Windows environment. The only areas where Windows beats (soundly) Netware is in ease of installation and application selection. Unless you absolutely must have an application that runs exclusively under Windows, there is no compelling reason to use a Microsoft network.

The reason this makes sense

[flydpnkrtn]

The reason this makes sense is mostly because of driver support. Anyone seen any major support for new iSCSI SAN devices for NetWare lately?

By moving NetWare into Xen they gain the driver support SUSE Linux Enterprise Server will have, and at the same time create an environment that makes it easy to upgrade.

To the top poster - it's not exactly easy to migrate away from a platform like eDirectory once you've committed to it, and yes Virginia, eDirectory does scale better than Active Directory any day.

Re:Skeptical

[drsmithy]

The whole idea of a WYSIWYG text editor was a novel idea (no pun intended) but you only need to look at why no professional web dev uses dreamweaver in layout mode to understand why it is a failure in the long term. The results are sloppy. You end up with a document full of bloated markup that does not actually change what the page looks like, instead it just contains loads of elements that countermand each other.

It's not a failure at all. It allows people who would not otherwise be able to produce even a slightly well-formatted document, do so. For those who are genuinely interested in "proper" layout procedures - and have the discipline and knowledge to use them - the ability to do so is not impeded by the existence of WYSIWYG tools.

The only way WYSIWYG is a "failure" is if you subscribe to the view that "we are worse off now that more people can be productive".

Re:For those who don't know netware ...

[sciurus0]

A fairer comparison would be among Netware permissions and POSIX [www.suse.de] or Windows [microsoft.com] ACLs.

Re:Skeptical

[rickb928]

Actually,most of what has changed about NetWare over the past 10 years has been new 'features': iFolder in particular comes to mind.

And I recall getting my NetWare 5 server running at home sometime around 1998, or was it 2000? I had my trusty modem autodialing into my own ISP bank. BorderManager as my firewall, happily blocking ads, logging the few (back then) attempts to probe my connection. I ran the NAMP stack (NetWare/Apache/myQL/Perl/PHP) and having fun. I ran Websphere just to see if it would. Tomcat, the Advantage xBase engine, Mercury SMTP alongside GroupWise. At the time, Microsoft didn't have all of that so well done.

Oh yeah, and my personal record on a NetWare server is 1300+ days. My home server ran over 960 days at one stretch. The story of a NetWare server being walled in by accident is attributed to a New York-based Fortune 50 headquarters. Perhaps the only other platform that can easily claim that sort of reliability would be the AS/400 series, which is also reputed to have had at least one server walled in and 'lost'. It was looked for only when the lease expired. I don't doubt it.

None of that really mattered. Microsoft was running NetWare over and backing up to go over it again.

The NetWare Client for Windows was bloated mostly to accomodate the problems of Widows Networking. For one thing, if the Windows AD client did a lookup for something and didn't find it, it would happily look 'everywhere else'. The NetWare client, if not finding it in NDS or Windows, stopped and said 'not found'. The concept of looking everywhere else when it wasn't found within the directory you had struck me as ludicrous. But for Windows, it was SOP. And cost you a minute or two waiting for the inevitable failure. At least in NetWare you got an answer in 2-3 seconds, depending on network performance.

I miss NetWare. But the fight is over. Just don't try and tell me Windows IS any better, even today. It's just more popular.

Re:For those who don't know netware ...

[damn_registrars]

Interesting comparison, except for the fact that the POSIX standard for access control was never formally adopted - and as far as I've ever seen, never been implemented in anything out of the box, and similarly, implementing ACL in windows is non-trivial.

The permissions for netware, on the other hand, are all done server side, are very easy to set up (being as the server OS is made to do it), and virtually transparent to the user. In a good windoze / netware environment, the user doesn't even know when they're transitioning from a local HD to a netware mount, aside from perhaps slightly slower access times.

design principle of loose coupling is ! The MS Way

[Gary W. Longsine]

Your comments remind me that the objective "everything to everyone" very nearly defines a general purpose computer, including the entry level server. There exit better ways to implement complex systems, even though like the general purpose computer which are intended to meet, to a large degree, this somewhat nebulous objective. One architectural principle, which is very important in helping to produce a complex system, and which seems to elude Microsoft is that of "loose coupling".

Some layers or components should be cleanly separated by well designed and well documented interfaces. When loose coupling is considered to be an important design objective, you can wind up with a system in which both a rapid evolution in technology, and a stable technology and production base, are possible. (More generally, the complex system can facilitate multiple competing objectives, and let you, the client, operator, or administrator, choose at run time which objectives you seek.) The architecture permits this, for example, by providing abstractions such as "modules" which let the administrator choose what components to load and run, swapping in new modules if they need to be "on the cutting edge" or using the tried and true ones if they need stability more than any other objective, for example. As a reasonable example of this principle, consider "the web" as a loosely coupled complex system, or consider simply Apache as a very coherent example of a single system where multiple modules doing different things and created by different authors co-exist pretty peacefully over generations of software revisions and wholesale architectural changes.

When loose coupling is ignored, or subjugated to the desire to create opportunities for "vendor lock", you wind up with things like the SMB/CIFS [wikipedia.org] snafu (that may sound harsh, but calling it a "protocol" is overly generous).

The items you mention in your point "2" above are nearly all rooted, ultimately, in the failure to consider the principle of loose coupling, when designing a complex system. Well, honestly as far as I can tell, Microsoft intentionally undermine it at every turn by trying to tie everything to everything else so that you get snared in the "Chinese finger trap [wikipedia.org]" that is the Microsoft world.