Novell Cancels BrainShare Conference

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?

[Gr33nNight]

We have a Novell backend, and use Groupwise and Zenworks. We do not use NetBEUI or IPX/SPX.

Re:IPX was actually a very nice protocol

[dedazo]

Agreed. There was nothing wrong with IPX at all. The standardization on TCP/IP and the death of other packet protocols is not so much going for something "better", but rather for the least common denominator. Not that that's particularly bad, since it's important for a more open internet and better interop, but it doesn't take away anything from the technical value of other implementations.

Anyone remember LANtastic? As long as you didn't use Token Ring it was pretty good as well.

Re:IPX was actually a very nice protocol

[IGnatius T Foobar]

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

Yup. And now there's a push for IPv6. Automatic address assignment on IPv6 turns the 48-bit MAC address into a portion of the IPv6 address. It's startlingly similar to IPX. If the Internet had been based on IPX, and they figured out a way to make IPX run at a global scale (finding equivalents to things like BGP) we wouldn't be in the impending address exhaustion pickle we are today.

Re:IPX was actually a very nice protocol

[virtue3]

Uh... guys, it's called UDP, which has pretty much entirely replaced IPX. Mostly because it's the same protocol more or less running through IP. It saves you from having to install multiple network interfaces on your system. And it's all going through the same layers. That and UDP can work through NATS/Firewalls, which I'm not totally sure IPX did successfully (at least back in teh day when I was still learning how to use port forwarding when I was playing star craft games over a LAN).

Re:Half-Assed Truths

[drspliff]

I used eDirectory on Linux and Netware and it every now & then we'd login to one of the main directory boxen and see the whole console filled with abends. As far as file-serving went it was absolutely rock solid, but never managed to see how it fared on Linux (I left the company when they were still using nw6.5 and unitedlinux/sles) because we just didn't "trust" it when our existing setup worked fine.

I don't know how far they've gotten along with making SuSE more streamlined, but at the time most of our Linux installs were authenticating against the eDirectory servers via LDAP, whenever these went down nss_ldap, pam_ldap and friends would fsck up completely until rebooted... (it would hang forever logging in, even as `root`).

Their whole approach seems to be trying to weigh the monetary cost of each option, keeping netware alive vs using linux, adopting to linux vs "trusted" stability and so on... not a position I'd like to be in.