Paul, I'll try to answers your questions but you really ought to look
at the product literature on Novell's web site to get a good feel for
what the various (and there are many) IP-based NetWare products do.
There are several ways that IP and NetWare can work together:
1) Client systems need to run IP locally.
LAN WorkPlace for DOS, Windows, Mac and OS/2 are all native
TCP/IP stacks and applications that have been around for
years. They are historically among the best-selling PC-based
TCP/IP clients on the market, even if Nimrod's company doesn't
use them. These products are no more or less IP-centric than
any other products (like NetManage or WRQ or FTP or whoever).
Compare this to MS, which provides a stack in the client, but
no apps (other than character-based telnet and ftp clients).
Novell's native-IP client is 100 times better than MS'.
2) Client systems need to run IP apps and access IP-based systems
but don't want to run IP on their PCs.
There are a number of vendors that offer IPX-based IP gateways
that allow customer to run WinSock-based apps over IPX. Another
system on the LAN then turns these IPX packets into IP. Among
the vendors offering these products are FTP (via the acquisition
of Novix), QuarterDeck, Cisco, and now Novell. These gateways
provide a natural firewall, and also keep the number of desktop
protocols down to one. Since lots of companies have internal
networks of IPX (just like lots have SNA and IP), using an
IPX gateway solution makes a lot of sense.
By the way, Microsoft makes one of these for NT now.
3) Clients need to access NetWare servers, but don't want to run
IPX on their PCs.
This is what NetWare/IP provides. It's also what was provided
with the IPTUNNEL.NLM that used to come with NetWare 3.x (and
still does with 4.x). DOS, Windows, NT, and OS/2 clients can
run IP stacks on their desktops while still running NetWare
applications and services 100%. This is done by encapsulating
NCPs (NetWare Core Protocols) inside of IP packets instead of
IPX packets.
This is what most people compare to NT's "native" TCP/IP network
services. However, they tend to conveniently forget that NT is
using NetBIOS datagrams inside of TCP/IP, which is a joke. NCP
inside of IP is a million times more robust and scalable than
NetBIOS-over-TCP.
4) The NetWare server needs to interact with IP-based systems.
NetWare 3.x and higher has come with a free, bundled TCP/IP stack
that runs on the server, allowing you to use your server in non-
NetWare shops. For example, if there are UNIX hosts on the
network that need to access the NetWare server's filesystem, they
can do so using the NFS server component on the NetWare host. If
NetWare DOS clients need to access remote UNIX filesystems, they
can do so using an NFS driver with LAN WorkPlace, or they can
add the NFS Gateway to their NetWare server, which will make
the remote NFS system look like a NetWare volume. There are other
add-on products, like an FTP server, a Telnet server, a print
server, and of course a web server.
Microsoft has a print server, and an FTP/Web server, but no
NFS or Telnet servers.
As you can tell, there are a lot of options available to NetWare
customers regarding the use of TCP/IP on NetWare LANs. Networking is
about cross-platform connectivity, something Novell understands, and
that multi-vendor customers need. Novell supports their own, optimized
technology, as well as IP-centric systems like UNIX, Mac systems,
mainframes, DEC VAXes, and even OSI hosts.
On the other hand, MS only supports Windows and Mac. The difference
is that Novell is a networking company, and MS is a desktop company.
The people that use NT for networking either discover this the hard
way, or they lower their expectations and then get rid of everything
but their WinTel systems. I'm not one who likes to let my vendor tell
me what I can or cannot buy. Some people need that, just like they
used to turn their computing budgets over to IBM.
> The second school includes companies like Netscape which have put
> their web server products on every NOS except Novell claiming
> something about Novell not supporting "open systems".
I doubt that was the terminology used for their reasons not to port
their servers to NetWare. It was probably the terminology used to sell
against NetWare as a corporate networking platform in general (ie, in
competition).
I agree that there should be loads of third-party, non-Novell TCP/IP
products available on the NetWare platform. I use my home NetWare
server for SMTP/POP mail, DNS, Web and FTP with no problems
whatsoever, so I know that there are a variety of solutions on the
market already. What's missing is a "big name" like Netscape. From
what I've seen in the press, Marengi is indicating that these
negotiations are on-going. |
