[PLUG] NetWare & Linux?

[Michael Robinson]

> Was Netware 4.7 a typo? I've been through 4 revisions of that OS and can
> tell you that I have not had that experience (but then, I never took an
> instructor led course, it was all hands on and challenge).

Mike Neal studied a lot of Netware but he said to just stick with Linux now.
I'd like at some point to either adapt the Netware protocol philosophy prior
to 5 and develop an open source protocol replacement for ip that works 
under Linux and any other OS that wants it or get a different kind of Novell
training.  I like online do it yourself better.  I need to know in a short 
period of time why I'm studying something and enough about shortcomings,
etc to not come out the other end with nothing useful.
 
I still think the licenses are too expensive for Netware and the failure
to advertise/develop Netware as an OS agnostic product will probably
prove fatal for the environment in the future.  Caldera Openlinux was an 
interesting notion, but Novell should have developed a product that 
brings Netware to a standard Linux environment.  There is good stuff
in Netware but Novell as a company is probably no better than Microsoft,
an intractable problem.

It would be interesting to develop a different operating system than Linux 
with Linux as the inspiration that is geared toward workstation use with the
intention of having Linux as the server.  The reasons to do this are: be able
to use a network filesystem that is better than samba or nfs, have a
workstation system with better networking than Windows, and achieve 
simpler configuration than Linux.  Develop a lan networking protocol and 
use that with your workstation Linux-like OS removing all ip stuff.  Get X 
working cleanly and steal one idea from 98, a graphical device manager.  
Don't borrow the having to reboot all the time issue.  On top of this, 
develop your workstation targeted Linux-like OS to be network bootable off 
your Linux server so that you don't have to have a local hard drive to use 
it.  This is where a network filesystem that intelligently uses a ramdrive to 
read a file out of that it needs to retrieve quickly really starts to matter. 
Especially when net speed is limited to 100 mb/s.  Abandoning ip allows
using a better networking protocol and securing ones lan can be made
easier with an intelligent plan and the absence of the ip junk.  
Abandoning samba abandons the myriad of issues that it inherits
from trying to support Windows networking.  Abandoning the need for a
local hard disk makes the system more valuable than Windows giving it
flexibility.  Intelligent use of a ramdisk makes this system better than an 
LTSP solution, unless there's a way to use a ramdisk enhanced network
filesystem instead of NFS.  Most importantly is for your linux-like
workstation OS to be small footprint and open source.  It would be wise
to solve the different header files for different versions of the same library
and other similar compilation/upgrade issues which seem to have gotten
out of hand.

    --  Michael C. Robinson