Novell Cancels BrainShare Conference 102
A.B. VerHausen writes "While OSCON and SCALE organizers ramp up plans for their events, Novell shuts down BrainShare after 20 years, citing travel costs and budget tightening as main concerns. 'Instead of the traditional in-person conference, Novell plans to offer online classes and virtual conferences to make education and training available to more people at a lower per-head cost to companies,' says the news story on OStatic.com."
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
We use a Novell back end for file and print services. You know it's all based on Suse Linux now, right? Novell dropped Netware last year, I think. Almost all of last year's Brainshare was about Linux. Good times, I'm sad to see it go.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Netware? (Score:4, Informative)
IPX was actually a very nice protocol (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: I spent a year (91-92) working for Novell in Utah.
That said, IPX was in many ways both more forward-looking and easier to administrate than IP networks:
Instead of statically allocated local addresses or DHCP servers, IPX use the 48-bit MAC address as the only local identifier.
IPX and IP both use 32-bit external addresses, but the IPX 32-bit address is simply the address of the network, with no addressing mask to split it into net/host parts. This meant that clients could be plugged in anywhere and just worked, without any DHCP servers, and since each Netware server was allocated its own internal 32-bit network address, it was trivial to install multiple network cards for load balancing and/or redundancy:
If a single link went down, all traffic would automatically be rerouted to the other interface, while having a single unique server address.
This same mechanism was a key part of Software Fault Tolerant (SFT) NetWare, which used a mirrored (over a separate fast/high-bandwidth link) link to replicate all inputs between two servers: This allowed Drew Major (the chief architect) to keep the two servers in lockstep, and handle pretty much any kind of single disaster (up to and including smashing a server with a 100-ton press) without a single client drop.
As a programmer I really liked the way IPX used Async Event Blocks (AEBs) to control all send/receive operations, with optional application callbacks at interrupt time.
At one point (around 1988?) this allowed me to write an IPX-based print server under Dos, which managed to fit a dual-buffered print receiver, interrupt-driven serial and parallel port printer interfacing plus all the housekeeping needed for a TSR, inside about 1600 bytes.
This allowed 2x512 bytes as print buffers, 256 bytes as the local stack and about 300+ bytes for all the remaining code and data.
Terje
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps you meant NCP?
Half-Assed Truths (Score:5, Informative)
We're migrating off of the last of our Netware boxes, some of them have over four years of uptime so we're not exactly rushing to swap them out. Many of these boxes are being replaced with their new SUSE Linux-based counterparts that offer the same Netware file and directory services that we had before. So far the experience has been terrible. Large file servers that never crashed on Netware now go down weekly. Directory services simply stop answering LDAP queries with no explanation. Sometimes we can restart the service without rebooting, but usually a poorly implemented kernel module blows out and takes the whole system down with it.
We aren't suffering from problems with Linux, instead we suffer from Novell rushing ported Netware services out the door to make their SUSE offerings look like a complete and competent replacement for Netware. They're not there yet, so I find some truth to the parent's troll that "it's all half-assedly based on Suse Linux now," because in many ways it is.