Microsoft-Novell Relationship Hits the Skids 194
Anonymous writes "According to Channelweb, the bloom might be off the rose in the Novell-Microsoft relationship: the two companies didn't sign a single, solitary large customer to a Novell Linux deal during the most recent quarter. 'So Novell, one of the biggest Linux distributors in the world, and Microsoft, one of the biggest companies in world history, couldn't find a single large customer on Planet Earth to buy into Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server software. Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian has stepped up and, rather than point fingers at Microsoft for that performance, put the blame on his company and its inability to strengthen its reseller channel.'"
Re:And Raise Your Hand If You're Surprised (Score:4, Informative)
Until 2005, my Netware servers were an order of magnitude mroe reliable than my Windows servers. Period.
NDS 'worked' when AD was borked. Does no one remember mixed mode, and the joy of early Server 2K? We will leave NTAS out of this, though it was the first competitor to NetWare.
The myth that NetWare is no better or worse than Windows was untrue up till Server '03, and then only barely.
The real reason NetWare failed to survive? Not reliability. Applications. Microsoft built apps on Windows servers that you could program in essentially the same IDE as the client Windows desktop app. NetWare required you learn .NLMs and be in a foreign and not very good IDE. Microsoft salted the community with freebie dev tools, and from there on in, it was over. Of course, hosing the Novell client didn't hurt either. As an example, the Novell client would return a 'not found' in 2 seconds when it had searched the tree and did not find what you were looking for. The Microsoft client would then spend 15 seconds begging for a response from any resource, after it had searched all it knew. Ok, just for grins, why would you ask essentially 'anybody out there got this?' when you have already searched all you know? The fraking MUP drove us crazy. And people blamed Novell. Nice.
Microsoft out smarted Novell. We lost. Darn. But not because they were better.
Re:And Raise Your Hand If You're Surprised (Score:3, Informative)
Netware was a complete POS.
You and I must have used different products called "Netware". While Windows was totally fucking incompetent on the filesharing tip, you would have Novell servers with uptimes of months. The biggest problem with Netware was maintenance. When it came time to do maintenance it was time to place your bets as to whether the system would actually work properly after you installed a patch, or installed some software. Did netware have no memory protection or something? Installing two complex packages on the same server was pretty much guaranteed to fuck it up, especially if one of them was Arcserve.
Re:Well, seriously... (Score:2, Informative)
All-Intel chipset and you'll be very happy indeed. Except your graphics will be crappy. But they'll work!
(Do you have links to where you asked? I'm somewhat surprised you got no response.)
Re:Well, seriously... (Score:3, Informative)
It has been my experience (YMMV) that SuSe has better hardware support than some of the others.
On the other hand, I think it is Debian, possibly Ubuntu, that has a licensed package of codecs for stuff like mp3s and other files. With SuSe, the best method for me is to add the Pacman reository (SuSe makes it really easy) but those are codecs and not drivers.
The only 3rd party driver I've needed for SuSe has been the standard Nvidia driver, but again, SuSe makes that near automatic too.
Linux isn't that hard to deal with but it is a new paradigm and takes a little getting used to. For a standard setup, I really like SuSe. If you want the multimedia stuff with better mpeg support, learn about Pacman. But I think you will find Linux very powerful and very rewarding.
And if you want to get under the hood and explore the UNIX-like underpinnings, it is really an amazing OS and you won't ever look back. Also, if you still need to run some Windows applications, check out Codeweavers.com for Crossover Office. It's great and allows you to load and run Microsoft Office and a bunch of other Windows apps under Linux.
Re:Well, seriously... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well, seriously... (Score:2, Informative)
At least in SuSe you can open the yast2 control center and configure the network stuff, open holes in the firewall for various services, configure your display and such, set up users, and basically everything you can do in Microsoft's control panel and more.
I haven't done anything with Wine but Codeweavers is one of the biggest contributors to the Wine project. I fyou go Linux and have issues with Wine, remember Codeweavers.
Re:Muddled Issues (Score:3, Informative)
Your complaint should be with whoever wrote that doc (just a random user reciting what worked for them) not with the software capabilities.
I have joined Ubuntu machines to AD domains without hardcoding much of that stuff at all.
eg krb5 can look up everything it needs (KDCs, realm names etc) in the DNS without needing a config file. The only reason to hardcode a realm in there is if you want a default one so you don't need to specify it in your login name.
In smb.conf, most of those hardcoded bits aren't required. I think realm is (not sure) but workgroup, netbios name, and password server aren't.
Nothing in pam or nss was hardcoded in that exmaple anyway.
Putting the domain name in the home directory path is optional.
The kinit step is also unnecessary.
So your three questions on Windows correlate nicely with the 3 things you need to tell samba.
1) realm name in smb.conf
2) user name to join with (in the net ads join command)
3) password (also part of the net ads join command)