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

To: DJBEINO who wrote (23452)	8/10/1998 3:07:00 PM
From: Bob Howarth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

MSFT will have to behave here and not spread lies etc since Justice Department will be watching!!!!!

To: DJBEINO who wrote (23452)	8/10/1998 11:10:00 PM
From: Jack Whitley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42771

Good review for Netware for Small Business in InternetWeek - ********************************************** July 27, 1998, Issue: 725 Section: Reviews -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NetWare For Small Biz Too Cool For School Oliver Rist This is going to be another of those "cool product" columns. When it first came out, I didn't pay NetWare for Small Business (NSB) much mind. After spending a whole lot of time and some other publishing company's money on the full Certified NetWare Engineer (CNE) course load back in 1994, I couldn't imagine that a NetWare designed for John Q. Everyman actually could work. If you've been through even a few of those classes, you know what I mean. Since my CNE experience, I've had less and less contact with NetWare. There's always been a 4.11 server in the lab, but it just doesn't get used as much now that everyone is designing new products for Windows NT. Then it crashed last year. I kept meaning to fix it, but that's like cleaning grout. You mean to do it every weekend, but something else always comes up. That's why I was kicking myself after I agreed to a GroupWise 5.5 beta review. You just want to get through those reviews with a minimum of hardware fuss because there's so much work to do evaluating the software. So, as I stared at the frozen "Product Kernel Message" error display, I knew there was no way I wanted to rebuild the thing right then. What to do? Well, Novell was thoughtful enough to supply a full five-user version of NSB with the GroupWise beta and a little pamphlet titled "GroupWise and NSB Express Installation." The term "Express" caught my eye. So, I figured I'd sacrifice a half-hour and an NT-based Dell Dimension that had to be reinstalled anyway to try this thing out. If it didn't work, I could always go back to the full 4.11 box. Wow! Not only did it work, it did so flawlessly. This has to be one of the best "automatic installs" I have ever seen. Stick the supplied Novell DOS boot disk in the floppy drive and the Install CD in the CD-ROM drive, hit enter a few times and that's it. Literally. The system takes care of booting, reformatting your hard disk, installing DOS and NetWare partitions, installing CD-ROM drivers and then copying NetWare to the hard disk. Copying the final load of files takes about 45 minutes, but after that, all you need to do is decide on server and tree names. The system follows that with an automatic config that takes care of installing all your hardware drivers and the IPX protocol. I happened to have NT clients on the network with standard Novell client software installed. You literally could see the server suddenly pop up on their Neighborhood screens all by itself. The ultimate coolness was the automatic install of FastTrack, which also loads NAT and sets up a DHCP server as well. Of course, I managed to crash it later, but that's entirely due to the beta nature of GroupWise 5.5. If you stick with the GroupWise 5.2 version that ships with NSB, you'll do just fine. There are limitations on the server as far as full Novell Directory Services support and only 25 or fewer users per server, but these can easily be upgraded to the full 4.11 version. At $995 for a base five-user LAN, this version of NetWare is amazingly easy and a real deal for a fast plug-and-forget server install. Highly recommended. Oliver Rist is contributing technical editor at InternetWeek and technical director of Grand Central Networks. He can be reached at orist@grand-central.net. Copyright r 1998 CMP Media Inc.