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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PJ Strifas who wrote (30031)	1/23/2000 9:13:00 PM
From: jwright	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

PJ said >> Another thing that's completely from LEFT FIELD - you do not need to know which server an NDS object is on to access it. In fact, an NDS object can be found on any number of servers that hold a "replica" of that portion of NDS. Replicas are actual copies of the NDS information, broken up into smaller, more manageable pieces and strategically positioned throughout your network for many reasons (increasing user peformance and fault tolerance are 2). Therefore I do not need to know what server holds the NDS information but rather that from my position in NDS, I have enough information to find that object through NDS itself. There's a slew of technical reasons that MSFT boldly passes over that in reality make their claim rather misleading. << You do have to be connected to a server that holds that information. How do you get connected to that server? Currently Novell's solution works okay for corporate customers managing their own tree but doesn't work very well across trees. How do you find that other tree without calling and asking someone their tree structure and naming scheme. NDS naming is not globally unique. This is why the Internet and web-browsing work today by being tied into the DNS Domain naming scheme. Novell has these problems because it was originally tied to IPX and local lan environments where this problem didn't exist. This is definitely a case where Microsoft coming late to the party has an advantage in implementing a naming scheme consistent with what is being used on the Internet. Later Jimmy

To: PJ Strifas who wrote (30031)	1/24/2000 2:48:00 PM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Hello PJ, Sounds like only a few more things to fix and Microsoft might be doing ok ... I know that you pointed out a few issues, but I would propose that Microsoft is already hard at work to correct these issues ... Novell has given them the "hit list" and they have no doubt already assigned the "soldiers" to attack the issues. I thought that the response was well written, and a good "next move" in the game ... I'll await Novell's reply or next wave of attacks. I really do think that these serve as very good outlines of what developers at both companies need to address. As Jimmy said, the DNS issues (or namespace issues in general) are the biggest, IMHO, for the next little while. People need to get some sort of naming conventions figured ... Also, on a couple of points ... you comment about the classic "two-phase commit" types of situations ... > The issue that MSFT can not dance around is the way in which Active > Directory manages changes to the information it stores. In NDS, the > information is timestamped by the system - every server on the > network agrees to a pre-specified "network" time. This becomes the > basis of prioritizing changes to the data in NDS. Thus if 2 or more > people make changes, the changes happen in the order they occurred > according to the time on the network. This is a rather fool-proof > system. I'm not sure how you are stating that this is "different" and "better" than Microsoft's approach. Please, test this one on your network, and let's see what you find: 1. Run NWAdmin (the NDS administration tool) on two different workstations. 2. Open the same User in both copies. 3. Edit the "Account Balance" attribute for each user - make one be 5000 and the other be 6000. 4. Save the changes ... try to click the Ok button in each at the same time. 5. What is the "fool proof" nature of the results that you are going to find? What will the value be? Ahhh ... the "last" value ... or latest value ... or the largest timestamp. You can do this test with any of the user attributes ... so timestamps simply mean that the "last person to save" wins ... is that consistant to the other administrator? Both directories have the same types of issues that come up ... that is why even Tim Howes says that the directory is not the solution for all problems ... ;-) I know that these comparisons are good to see, but when moving down a standards track, the differences in products are going to get slimmer and slimmer ... I believe that the focus needs to be on applications of this technology ... not the technology itself. This is what Microsoft says, and is doing, with moving their developers to AD ... ;-( Scott C. Lemon