Ross Thompson has this question for you all: "I'm a consultant in the DFW, Texas area and have been tasked with cutting IT costs for a large (600+ users) Fortune 1000 company. Currently the company running NT/Novell networks and WinFrame. DHCP is being utilized for WinFrame. All clients are running NT Workstation 4.0. At this point, management isn't too happy with Microsoft, since they spend millions of dollars each year in clients licenses and support costs. I would (maybe) like to suggest going with Linux clients to save these costs." Sound interesting? Well, click below!

joe writes in with this call for assistance: "I purchased a used Castelle Print server that only has the DOS configuration software that needs to be run with administrator access level on a Novell network. I would like to use this print server with Linux and OS/2, however, I am unable to set it up without the proper software. This is an older printserver no longer supported by Castelle. I am hoping someone can give me some software (manual calls it uxconfig) or directions on how to get this working."

Fredrik Lindgren writes "Don't know if this is old news, but I haven't seen it before. Network World InFusion (E-mail newsletter) has the following to say: Linux gets NDS boost and other top news: Novell officials last week revealed the company is plotting to port its directory services technology to Linux, giving the suddenly hot Unix variant yet another surge of momentum." The full article is here Ed: For those that can't read, this is NDS, NOT Netware (an existing product)

Bob Keyes has written a piece on a Linux University. Some sort of system to help educate people about Linux, as well as administer some loose testing to credit the people who know there stuff. Read on to see what he has to say about it.

Infoworld has an review of Caldera's Netware for Linux. Unfortunately, it did not receive the rave reviews Samba did. Given that Caldera licences it from Novell who have their own OS, it might be in Novell's interest to limit its performance and configurability on other platforms. Thanks to contributor Mark Stone for this one.

Microsoft is hitting back at critics with subpoenas of its own. Among those affected is Caldera. Microsoft is trying to back up its claim that all other OS's include Internet support, so they should too. I wonder though whether Caldera was chosen for OpenLinux or OpenDOS. Thanks to Joe Merlino for alerting us. Here's some historical background

The Butler Group (UK) has published a technical paper pointing out that NT 4.0 cannot be considered an enterprise solution because it lacks the directory services that Netware provides. However, despite Unix's scalability and robustness, it costs too much in expertise, hardware and software, so the main battle will be played out between Novell and Microsoft. But NT also has its disadvantages: skills shortage, and general robustness. Since the report costs money, you can get the low-down in this Register Article.

Samba provides SMB support, there's also AppleTalk support, so is there any Netware support for Linux other than through DosEmu.

Chris Tyler has written an excellent piece examining the recent Gartner Group article we mentioned yesterday, and discussing what Linux needs to do in order to achieve Linus' vision of Total World Domination. It's an excellent piece worth your time.

Lars Larsen writes "Novell has released the results of a study that shows that spam costs British and Irish businesses more than US$8 billion annually. They claim their email software will solve the spam problem but the really amusing part is that Novell's mail servers are open relays. You can read more about it here. "

Back in 1993 Larry McVoy from Sun Microsystems wrote a paper in which he proposed a cooperation between Sun, Novell and other companies to provide a an open source OS that would unifie the Unix market and run DOS and Windows applications. Five years later his visions seem remarkably correct and are still up-to-date.