InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
November 9, 1998
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continued...page 2 of 3
Additionally, there are still some problems with the usability and consistency of the interface that have not been resolved since Beta 3. For instance, in some places, when entering data in a form, you can tab from one field to the next, while in other places, that doesn't work. Also, when you finish entering data, hitting the return or enter key does nothing. Instead, you must click on the OK button to close the window.
Similarly, when you have clicked on something, there is no hourglass or other icon to show that something is happening. Many operations take long enough that some people will think their commands are not being heeded and click again and again, not realizing this may cause other problems.
I found it to be a real pleasure to be able to administer NDS from the console, though, and if the hardware is fast enough, doing so is not much more cumbersome than using the NetWare Administrator from a workstation. It can be much easier to make changes from the server, rather than having to find a workstation from which to log in, especially with a new server that doesn't have any accounts established on it yet.
New Features
The biggest networking feature in NetWare 5 is native IP. IP is no longer just supported--it can be the only protocol running, and NetWare no longer encapsulates IPX within the IP; both client and server are running pure IP. This should result in better performance on all-IP networks. A domain naming system (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol server allows for full TCP/IP functionality and compatibility with other TCP/IP systems on the network.
Memory protection has been improved substantially in NetWare 5. There is less chance of having one ill-behaved NetWare Loadable Module crash other NLMs or the server.
DHCP is a service that automatically provides a TCP/IP address to devices on the network. Because information on the devices is stored in NDS, NDS must be extended to include the additional objects and types of information. This is done with a utility, NDIPINST.NLM, that is run on the server. Then the DNS-DHCP console must be installed on a workstation. Once this is done, the DNS and DHCP servers can be set up and configured with relative ease. The only thing lacking is a wizard that sets up subnets and subnet masks.
The Novell Storage System is new and very exciting. While my own testing was limited to a paltry 9-Gbyte drive with about 2 Gbytes of data, which mounted in about five seconds, I have seen an NSS volume of more than 200 Gbytes, with thousands of files on it, mount in a few seconds. The equivalent NetWare 4 volume would take 10 minutes to 15 minutes to mount.
Novell engineers have created and mounted a 2.5-terabyte (2,500 Gbytes) volume, and it mounted in about six seconds. In addition to providing enormously faster mount times, NSS allows for larger volumes as well as more than 1 billion files per volume, and file sizes of more than a terabyte. Unfortunately, the SYS volume cannot be an NSS volume.
There are a few drawbacks with NSS. Currently, NSS volumes don't support disk mirroring or striping (the RAID 0 and 1 storage that has long been supported in software by NetWare). You can, of course, create an NSS volume on a hardware RAID. NSS volumes also don't support Network File System (NFS, the standard Unix file system), File Transfer Protocol, file compression, transaction tracking, or data migration. If you need to support any of those functions, you'll have to use a standard volume.
If you have existing NetWare volumes, you can convert them to NSS volumes simply and easily (after making two backups and verifying them, of course). Converting them to NSS is a four-step procedure at the system console and takes a short time. This upgrade process cannot be used on the SYS volume.
Novell Distributed Print Services ships with NetWare 5 and allows for greatly simplified installation and administration of printers. If the printer supports NDPS (and many recent printers from most of the major players do), installing a new printer is a matter of plugging the printer into the network and creating one new object in the NetWare Administration console instead of three separate objects--printer, print queue, and print server. The whole process is automatic and takes seconds.
A five-user version of the Oracle8 database comes with NetWare. This will probably displace Btrieve as the database of choice for internal database functions on Novell servers, because developers can count on being able to use it for things such as backup records. More interesting, Oracle8 is heavily optimized for NetWare, which gives administrators an alternative to the SQL Server that is part of Microsoft's Back Office suite.
Zero Effort Networking (known as Z.E.N.works) is an attempt to ease the burden of supporting applications on hundreds or even thousands of desktop PCs. The starter pack included with NetWare 5 offers considerable functionality and second-generation features and stability, making the deployment of applications to hundreds of desktops simple, as well as allowing for the management of desktop operating system versions, service packs, driver sets, and so forth.
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Read sidebar, "NetWare 5 Arrives, Without Windows' Hype."
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