State of NetWare

Out of curiosity...

In the areas I circulate, I never hear about NetWare. Is NetWare still popular today? Still being used? How about its certifications, are they still encouraged, prefered, or requested by businesses/companies? Is it even worth learning or reading a book about it if is slowly falling?


One of my professors stated that Novell probably won't be pushing NetWare much in the future.

I would greatly appreciate your comments and your sharing of your experience with NetWare.

Thanks,
K

Yes it's still around though with the popularity of MS, Exchange/Outlook and the majority of techies getting the MS certs, it is slowly diminishing.

Look here www.jobserve.com/results.aspx?jobType=*&...amp;cb01=1&cid=0 as an example of current london jobs this week. (12 entries)

However, if you were to run the same search in London looking for Server 2003 there are a lot more entries. (631 entries)

Thats a pretty rough test but does tell a tale by any benchmark. Apart from the pros and cons of each (not including ipx which was a long time ago) it mainly comes down to what your employees are used to using as they go from job to job in life.

Actually the last release of Netware, Netware OES is the last pure NW kernel. They are moving to linux in a big way, and have ported pretty much everything over to Suse.

Shame really; Netware was years ahead of its time. I worked in an all-Netware shop back in the Windows 3.11 era, and it delivered a solid, functional multi-server network environment (by comparison, could you imagine running a commercial enterprise using windows 3.11 server?). Then came NDS, which for its time was a well-implemented and useful network directory system, again years earlier than active directory. Login scripts by container, user rights, a printing infrastructure that never crashed, the directory resilient across multiple servers, single enterprise-wide login, an OS that ran in well under a gigabyte of memory; it was all there.
Ah, the good old days...

15 years ago, Netware lost the battle with Microsoft. I was a CNE at the time. Hard to believe that there are still some customers using Netware now.

Most of the ones which I see are Commercial Banks which have a very large branch system built on SNA connectivity via Novell.

3.xx series was built on Unix and many of the copyright notices advised you of that.


I always liked the product, but times changed.

Back in the day, i was and are still a CCNE. Novell doesn't kill off your certification for the version you were certified under.

Novell If I remember correctly, didn't have a problem except for this. I remember Novell stock sharply dropped for some reason for a day or 2. During this time, the rumor of Novell going under was floating around. I was hearing this from the New guys that were Microsoft wannabee certified guys.

These guys pushed hard in our company to get Novell out and Microsoft in because of a corporate control issue. They wanted to control the environment and hence leverage their security in the company.

Out in the market, Microsoft saw this dip and applied heavy marketing and took advantage of the flux in the market in order to take over.

At the time, Windows NT sucked compared to Novell Netware. We were rebooting out MS servers every month or they would crash. Our Netware servers would stay up for at least a year without any memory leakages or problems. We had 800 plus users in the building and 6500 users abroad. Mostly we think about 900 users were on approximately 5 server. When we migrated over to Windows NT, we up graded all of our servers except for the primary Novell server and increased out server amount from 5 to about 20 servers. Not to mention, we still had to reboot all servers except fo the Netware server every month. The last I remember, the longest novell server stayed online was 377 days before rebooting and that was because of a system wide computer room shutdown.

I'd dare say if today, Novell stood were it did back then, Novell would still be on top,but, things are different now. Marketing
wins over the better product. Don't get me wrong, Windows 2003 (I have not used 2008 yet) is a great product. Much better than NT4.0, but, I think there is a lot of overhead and that darn blue screen of death gets annoying. Novell seem to have better control/isolation of apps. If something blew up, it was easy to remove. Just don't load it. None of this registry, go seek until you find all of he pieces of a program. Just unload (name or program) done.

Patches were easy to install. Just apply a patch to fix a problem or install a patch for security issues. That's all.

I don't know. what Novell would look like today nor how it would compare to MS win 2008, but back then, Novell was hard to beat.

BTW - speaking of old programs, whatever happened to Banyan Vines? Now there was a networking OS (Never used it,but, I heard it was hard to learn and robust)