Managers Find Few Ripples in Green River
The next rendition of NetWare includes features to ease network administration
By WAYNE RASH Jr.
It's no secret that Novell has been working on a new version of its NetWare network operating
system intended to overcome some of the limitations of the current release and to help the
company face the considerable opposition of Microsoft Windows NT Server.
In fact, the Green River project name is about as well-known as NetWare 4.1, the current version.
The new version represents more than just a name change, however. Novell is including some
substantial improvements in Green River.
Green River is identified as NetWare 4.11 when you start running it, but the 0.01 difference hardly
explains its many enhancements, which appear to be substantial. For example, the Novell
Directory Services have become distinctly more usable with Green River, management has also
become very easy and there are some significant differences in the tools that Novell is making
available with the new release.
With this new version of NetWare, running a network should be easily centralized, require fewer
labor hours and should allow more flexibility in the way that basic tasks are accomplished.
Although much of the ease of management with the new version of NetWare will come from a
redesigned and supplemented suite of applications, there's more to it than that. Novell has also
made changes to the basic foundations of NetWare, so it's easier to install, configure and update.
In fact, if you have the right selection of hardware and architecture, Green River will perform the
entire installation process for you.
On the other hand, getting to the point at which NetWare will perform its magic can be trying.
Installing Green River (and any other version of NetWare) from a CD-ROM requires that you
create a DOS partition on your hard disk, install DOS and DOS CD-ROM drivers, and then run
the NetWare installation program. It's not difficult, but it is just one more step to complete before
you can actually install the product.
Likewise, the hardware support, at least in the pre-beta version we looked at, is pretty slim.
Fortunately, that's less of a problem than it could be. We found, for example, that existing
NetWare 4.1 drivers worked perfectly, and Green River can scan your floppy disks for the right
driver.
Once Novell gets a more complete set of hardware support into Green River, which the company
said will happen before widespread testing begins, automatic hardware identification should be
supported for computers with Peripheral Component Interconnect and EISA bus architectures.
The information we received with this version of Green River said that identification isn't planned
for machines with an ISA bus.
Although we weren't able to confirm that the automatic identification features of Green River work
(the server we had available is an ISA machine), we were able to confirm that Green River, once
told what SCSI card and network interface card were installed, was able to recognize and identify
card settings, attached CD-ROM drives and so forth.
It was not able to detect the network number or frame type automatically, though this may have
been related to the fact that our 10Base-T test segment uses an Ethernet switch, which prevents a
network node from detecting any network traffic not intended for it.
Other than identifying the proper cards and then having to edit the network number manually, the
process of installing Green River worked flawlessly.
For the most part, we watched while the product installed itself, detected what kind of processor
was installed, correctly determined that we were using 32 megabytes of memory with an ISA
SCSI controller and then simply came up and ran.
New Tools
Included with Green River is a set of new administrative tools designed to make running the
network as easy as installing it. Although the new tools are mostly updates of the previous
graphical administration tools that came with NetWare 4.1, they do add some important features.
To use them, however, you must install Novell's 32-bit NDS client, which has some limitations of
its own, including very weak support for Fast Ethernet.
NWADMIN Used Most
The administration tool most network operators will use is Novell's NetWare Administrator. This
utility, fondly known as NWADMIN to Novell users, now lets you perform object creation tasks
quickly and easily. This means that if you want to add a user (a "user object" in Green River lingo),
you highlight the context where you want the user to go--the name of the directory tree--and
choose "create." This both creates the object and establishes the user account.
What's different about this approach is that everything on the network is an object, so you'll use
the NetWare Administrator for nearly every task.
Do you want to add a printer, create a network directory or establish a work group? It's all in the
administrator. The administrator tool also has the ability to view multiple NDS trees at the same
time, so administration of a large network isn't restricted to a single task all the time, which should
do a lot for productivity.
Novell has also included a new NDS Manager tool that makes administering Novell Directory
Services easier. This new tool lets administrators make changes to the directory tree, including the
ability to update NDS itself, without taking the server down. The ability of the NDS Manager to
manage the synchronization of the NDS databases should be an important feature for
administrators of large networks.
Other features promised by Novell for this release include a new migration wizard and a new
distributed print service. Neither of those products were available for this First Look, and a
number of other features weren't fully functional, but this is a pre-beta release.
Novell also includes an application launcher, which is supposed to let network administrators
create network-based applications, which we didn't test.
The products that were available seemed to be solid, appeared to perform well and installed and
ran without problems. Although we have some reservations about Novell's 32-bit client, that's not
really an issue directly related to Green River.
In general, Green River appears to represent a very nice improvement to NetWare 4.1, itself a
capable product. And though some finishing work clearly remains, it's also clear that Novell is
heading in the direction it needs to head if it intends to hang onto its leadership position in the
networking industry. We'll be interested to see if the final product actually meets this goal.
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Joe... |
