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Defining The Business Value Of Technology
March 13, 2000
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Upgrade to Novell's network operating system adds strong set of server applications
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aming conventions being what they are, longtime administrators might assume that Novell's NetWare 5.1 contains a handful of upgrades, patches, fixes and so forth. This is far from the case.NetWare 5.1 has many major additions. They start with NDS8, the latest version of Novell Directory Services, as well as IBM's WebSphere 3.0, and WebSphere Studio 3.0 Entry Edition. New, too, are NetWare Enterprise Web Server 3.6, Oracle8i, File Transfer Protocol, Web Search, News and Multimedia servers, and Halcyon InstantASP. All together, this adds
up to a very strong set of server applications--all provided at no additional cost.
One addition I find interesting is Novell's NetWare Management Portal, which allows administration of the server and NDS through a Web browser. This is a feature many administrators will welcome--no longer will they have to have a management workstation with Novell's Client32 network software loaded instead of Microsoft's NetWare client. Instead, any browser that supports Secure HTTP can act as a connection to administer NetWare and NDS.
There are some additional health-monitoring functions and server administration functions you can perform on NetWare 5.1 servers over the Management Portal. These are principally the kind of operations that you can perform through the Monitor NetWare Loadable Module, including statistics on memory usage, network traffic, and applications.
If you're trying to manage NetWare 4 and 5.0 servers as well, server health and control will still have to be performed at the server console or through RCONSOLE. However these functions can't currently be performed through NWADMIN, so the administrator doesn't lose anything. Overall, the management portal is a major boon to administrators.
I installed NetWare 5.1 final release candidate on a Hewlett-Packard LPr two-way Pentium III 500-MHz server with 512 Mbytes of RAM, two 18-Gbyte hard drives and a standard embedded 10/100 Ethernet interface. I had some initial problems with the Symbios CD-ROM, but the workaround for this problem is documented in the readme file. The support technicians I spoke with indicated that the problem should be fixed in the shipping version.
Once the CD-ROM difficulty was bypassed, the installation went smoothly, including the default installation of the NetWare Enterprise Web server, the management portal, and the rest of the server applications including the Oracle8i server. The installation interface isn't quite as mature as the competing interfaces, but it's a great stride forward from the old C-Worthy interface, and provides for a simple and straightforward installation, especially given the relative complexity of the applications being configured.
There are a couple of caveats to installing NDS8 on an existing NDS network. All servers must be running the most recent versions of the NDS NetWare Loadable Module for their operating-system version--NetWare versions 4.x and 5 are supported, but only with the latest support packs. Then the NetWare deployment manager should be run to query all servers and ensure that they have the appropriate software loaded. It's also a good idea to back up the directory. Once all the preparation is done though, upgrading an existing NDS directory to NDS8 is relatively painless.
NDS8 is the latest version of Novell Directory Services, with more than eight years of development behind it. The well-publicized demonstration of a directory with 1 billion objects aside, it brings major improvements in both scalability and speed, while still supporting all the NDS applications that have already been developed.
IBM's WebSphere 3.0 is a Java application server that supports Java Server Pages and Java servlets, as well as other standard Java tools.
It includes Extensible Markup Language for document interchange. WebSphere Studio 3.0 Entry Edition provides development tools for creating Web applications, including a visual page designer for HTML and Java Server Pages, wizards for creating database links to Web pages, and Visual Age, a Java development environment.
NetWare Enterprise Web Server 3.6 is the former Netscape Enterprise Web Server, a mature and stable program. Its biggest strength is tight integration with NDS, which makes development and deployment of very large sites or large numbers of sites (an ability most useful for mega-sites or Internet service providers) much easier, with mature and powerful user- and domain-management tools. With Halcyon InstantASP, it also provides Active Server Pages compatibility using Java servlets.
Oracle8i is one of the leading databases in the industry, and NetWare 5.1 includes it along with Oracle's WebDB, a browser-based development environment for building Web server back ends. As with the Web server, the tight integration with NDS aids in the development and deployment of large databases and in their integration with multiple Web sites.
NetWare includes FTP, Web Search, News, and Multimedia servers. The FTP server provides Internet-standard FTP services as well as the unique ability to log on to an NDS tree through FTP, which means administrators can enable secure access to their NetWare network from any FTP-capable terminal. The Web Search server can search and index Web servers within a company network, providing a quick search tool for all company information--even when it's maintained on multiple Web servers.
The News server provides Internet-standard Network News Transport Protocol newsgroup services, and also includes a simple interface for creating internal newsgroups. The Multimedia server supports the Real-Time Streaming Protocol to provide streaming audio and video on the network.
Additional features include Microsoft Windows 2000 compatibility with the WebDAV NSAPI extension and Office 2000 Web folders, Novell Script Pages, which provide scripting tools such as JavaScript, ActiveX, and NetBasic, and are compatible with Active Server Pages and public key infrastructure 2.0 support.
These are only the new features. The existing NetWare features such as Java Virtual Machine support, Zero Effort Networking (ZENWorks), NetWare distributed print servers, storage-management services, and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol support make for a powerful contemporary networking and Internet environment.
Given that NetWare 5.1 supports up to 4 Gbytes of RAM and up to 32 processors with its standard server edition, comes with a state-of-the-art directory service, and a large assortment of server applications, it's a huge value. It's stable, easier to install and administer than ever, and has great promise as an Internet applications server.
The only downside is that Novell hasn't been able to attract developers to NetWare in the same numbers that Microsoft has. This may be one reason Novell is offering a suite of applications at a price comparable to a basic network operating system from other companies. With its excellent new development tools and the large set of applications, Novell has a good chance to attract developers.
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