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Newsletter of the Melbourne Novell Users Group

March 1998

From the President - NUI Conference Report

Dear MNUG Members,

By now you will all be into the 1998 work load. For those who can remember our 1997 Christmas Party at Timezone and came - wasn't it GREAT - thanks for the emails and positive feed back.

I was sorry to miss out on David Shaw and his travelling show at the last meeting - I hear it was great.

Congratulations to Dean Sheffield and wife Amanda on the birth of Jordan, pity it caused him to miss the last MNUG meeting - Dean don't let it happen again - ok!

The truth is that while all you guys were having a great time with Dave Shaw and Netscape I was having an even better time in Provo, Utah at the NUI Presidents' Conference. - In fact that Thursday night was Karoke time - your President was too shy to make a fool of himself up on stage singing "Start it up" - so I didn't bring shame on the group by singing out of tune.

But seriously folks - it was an interesting conference and here are some tit bits below.

Technical tour for Asia Pacific:

Firstly the good news / bad news - We (Australia / N.Z./ Hong Kong, & Singapore) sat Ted Lloyd (the Novell Asia Pacific User Relations Manager) and John Winger down and demanded some action with regard to a Tech Tour of the region. We worked out a plan that would involve either a Technical Road show immediately after Brainshare (July) using some Lab & SE personnel resources from Brainshare or to do another Technical Road show late August / early September. This was a great result.

How ever immediately after the NUI conference Ted Lloyd, John Winger (CEO NUI) and several other NUI staff lost their jobs. Which has left us in Asia / Pacific out on a limb. We are still promised something, but what exactly has not been made clear. Don't worry your President is working to get something.

Novell in Provo is an exciting place:

Novell is in a series of low rise buildings that is located in a valley with a backdrop of snow capped mountains - wow what a view!

I got a full tour of Novell. First GNOC - Novell's Global Network Control Centre - a room the size of the conference room at Novell Melbourne with a wall covered in screens with another bank of screens and keyboards in a centre console monitoring all aspects of Novell's world wide network.

Then there is their production Server Room - 100 Compaq Proliants, each a Pentium Pro 200 with an average of 3GB of disk storage, lined up in about 10 rows of equipment - Now that was even more impressive.

Next I was shown their Lab - 1700 PCs stacked in rows 60 PCs long and 3 PCs high. They are planning to increase this to 2500 soon! That was mind blowing (I have digital pictures of all the above to prove (a) I was there and (b) it really does exist.

Technical Briefings:

Probably the high point address was a briefing by Drew Major, the chief technologist at Novell the guy that wrote NetWare - programming in Assembler!

He described his vision of a Web based NOS: exploiting 64bit Java - where developers will be writing apps optimised for Java, where the NOS will be more than just a resource sharing system but also one that facilitated access to information any where in the world (via the Internet), at a healthy speed (using caching especially reverse Proxy Caching - watch out for the new buzz word) and where management of the net is an integral part of the NOS.

NetWare 5:

As for NetWare 5 (Yes its NetWare again not IntranetWare), Drew claims it is the best yet - MUCH better than NetWare 4. He claims that this is the first time in the last 6 or 7 years that he can wax on about technology and products that he is excited about and that he believes are technologically cutting edge and will earn Novell leadership. I quizzed him about their policy towards bug fixes and backward compatibility of services and client. He promised that there was more than a year worth of aggressive testing in NetWare 5 and that most client issues should be solved by the time it is released. Similarly he promised that Novell would have a more aggressive policy towards bug fixes and to distributing them to users.

Drew confirmed that this new Java Server (NetWare5) will offer full backward compatibility to existing NLM Server Apps.

For those who love the GUI interface, NetWare 5 will have a GUI Java interface and console applets. Now NetWare will require a Pentium II 366 MHz to run - so for you power hog petrol heads or dealers who want to sell Servers with MORE grunt - Novell will make your life easier.

For those that love Apple Mac's the new NetWare 5 file system (NSS) it doesn't yet support Apple name space - but you can run both the present NetWare file system and the new file system on the same Server. With this new file system Novell claims that a 1 Terabyte storage system will load in 60 seconds in 1MB of Memory! As NSS is not a directory system (it is described as an object store) there is NO MORE Vrepair!

For those that love IP - NetWare 5 is built with the "real" IP as the standard - and yes you can still run IPX simultaneously.

What else: - NetWare 5 as a Java engine supporting databases such as Oracle, Lotus Notes, Sybase, SQL etc so that NetWare can be promoted as an Application server to compete directly with Unix or NT. NetWare 5 will include pre-emptive and non pre-emptive processing, I20 Support and Hot Plug PCI (eg. pull out and hot plug drives etc).

NDS for NT:

Eric Burkholder, the developer of this product extolled its virtues and the interesting PR war with Microsoft (see the war of words on the various Web sites about whether Microsoft will support NDS for NT.

ZEN Works:

ZEN - Zero Effort Networking was announced. Features included enhanced NAL (ver 2.5), remote workstation manager (including a workstation NDS object enabling workstation management even when the workstation is not logged in), Workstation and user policy management, and a helpdesk function. ZEN will eventually be merged into ManageWise (or Vice versa).

Other Things to come:

ODBC driver for NDS, Internet caching (ie. replicating Internet sites using caching servers), reverse proxy caching, a NW Admin snap to manage MS Exchange Server, Win 95 remote program load (oooh who wants it?), Oracle web application Server, plug & print printers (just give it a name and its context) - this will enable full reporting (eg. x printed copies x user x printer), NDS WAN management policies, NDS based licensing services, LDAP version 3 in NetWare5, Catalogue service in NDS under NetWare5, IP ver 6 "hooks" in NetWare 5 (but not yet implemented), ORION (otherwise known as Wolf Mountain) AND SO MUCH MORE . . . It was an action packed 3 days!

Advertising Novell?

John Slitz, Sr. VP Marketing faced considerable criticism from user group Presidents that Novell did not get out and advertise and promote NetWare. This, many felt was a major limitation compared to competitors who seem to dominate the media. He promised more promotion especially to the user base, but emphasised that their war chest was not as sizeable as that of Microsoft. The writer is not confident that we will see much exciting promotion from Novell.

Marc Heymann, President, MNUG.