Jim,
"I am sick of reading this FAQ and I want and need answers about Novell Compliance"
Did you check out the compliance statement from Novell? The link is
right at the top of the page you listed. In case you have trouble
finding it again, I've given it below.
novell.com
NW 3.12 and 4.11 are Y2K compliant, in the sense that all known date
dependencies are fixed in the latest patches. You would know this if
you kept your NetWare installations up to date, and read the detailed
bug fix descriptions that Novell supplies with every patch. You can
buy Novell products with confidence.
The products have not been certified as Y2K compliant by an
independant third party. When they have been (by the end of the
year) Novell will officially pronounce them as such. No other major
software vendor that I am aware of is taking the extreme step and
expense of having their products tested and certified by an
independent agency. To be certain, Microsoft isn't.
"No one can buy any software that doesn't comply (unless they are
quite stupid IMHO)- Are you listening? I can't buy Novell products -
What is the Date Y2K compliance? Our auditors have banned purchases
on non compliant software."
Gee, if you can't buy software that isn't Y2K compliant out of the
box, you have my sympathies. Of course, this makes purchasing
decisions easy, since there isn't very much you can buy.
I guess you're not buying any routers or switches (none of the major
ones have Y2K compliant software), no network management products
(most have significant problems), and only Unix OS's running on RISC
platforms (anything else if too iffy, most PC's being shipped today
are still not Y2K compliant).
You also say "NDS, Groupwise, BorderManager - THEY RUN AS NLMS. NO
ONE WANTS THIS CRAP!" To paraphrase another statement of yours, your
information is pathetic and your logic has failed.
First, explain what's so bad about an NLM? It's just an executable
program for a particular operating system - NetWare. The architecture
happens to run very fast and efficiently. This probably explains why
there are more client/server database systems hosted on NetWare than
on all other operating systems combined.
Secondly, neither NDS or GroupWise are available only as NLMs. NDS is
available TODAY (as in real products you can buy) for HP-UX, SCO
UnixWare, Linux, and probably a dozen other platforms. NDS as an NT
service is about to be released (within weeks - the actual release
date is being kept hush-hush), it will be available on Sun and RS/6000
systems by the end of the year, and on IBM's big iron early next year.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that none of these OS's run
NLMs.
GroupWise, of course, is already available for NT, OS/2, and several
versions of Unix. This issue has already been beaten to death on
this forum, in case you weren't paying attention.
If you want BorderManager on NT, sorry. It's on NetWare for a reason:
performance. If you want to run a proxy cache, firewall, RAS, RADIUS,
and secure encrypted public/private key authentication on NT, you
can cobble together a system that comes reasonably close to matching
the features of BorderManager. Better open your wallet wide, though,
and be prepared to accept much lower performance.
Jerry |
