By SHARON FISHER
Billed as the "Fight of the Century," Novell's directory services competition with Microsoft on Wednesday morning more closely
resembled the most recent Mike Tyson bout.
"Nobody likes a fixed fight," said Robert McNeill, a network engineer for AlliedSignal Inc., Houston.
Microsoft did not participate in the event.
The event consisted of five tasks, which the participants were to complete, using the fewest number of actions and as elegantly as
possible. Four of the five tasks were "won" by Novell Directory Services, but both the tasks themselves, and how they were
completed, were slanted to give Novell an edge -- even though such an edge wasn't always needed.
For example, one task was to move five employees from one company location to another, on the network directory. The point
of the exercise was to demonstrate that NDS lets network administrators drag and drop users within a directory tree, but that NT
Domain Services does not let network administrators drag and drop users between domains.
But the people acting as the NT team did not do the task in the most logical way, McNeill said. Typically, an NT network
administrator would have set up a backup domain, whereas the demonstration had them manually entering each of the users.
If the NT team had set up a backup domain, it could have meant up to a 15 to 20 minute delay should the primary domain
controller go down, McNeill said, which would have given Novell the edge in any case. "Novell would have won anyway, but
they fudged it," he said.
Similarly, a task of assigning network administrators for a workgroup worked well for a pure NetWare shop, but would not have
been nearly as easy in a mixed NetWare-NT shop, which is a far more typical scenario, McNeill said.
The standing-room-only event soon featured empty seats as the tone of the presentation became apparent.
Participants included 1976 Olympic boxing medalist Sugar Ray Leonard. |
