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To: keithsha who wrote (24218)	11/4/1998 8:10:00 PM
From: Peter Connolly	Respond to of 42771

If domains are so good, why does every commentator admit that they're flawed? Why is their TCO so high and lastly why are you attempting to replace them in NT5? The facts are - domains are broken today, as they have been since their introduction back in 198x. Everyone knows this but MSFT insist on saying they work, making yourselves look laughable as you try to keep a straight face. If you seriously think domains are scaleable and reduce TCO so much, why change? Don't fix it if it's not broken is the usual wisdom, does this not apply to you? Peter

To: keithsha who wrote (24218)	11/4/1998 11:25:00 PM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Respond to of 42771

Hello kiethsha, > You seemed to broken this agreement already My apologies ... but I will try to stick to this: > "I really don't want to get into a massive battle, so if you agree > to stick to honest open discussion I'll do likewise. But I do like > to fully understand the details of claims and implementations" I am curious ... Microsoft doesn't have a problem with you posting during work hours? Or are you on the East Coast? > As for your comment about directories, Novell positions it's > directory as providing single sign on and centralized management. I think that you have to agree that NDS has addresses a wide range of single sign-on issues by demonstrating the unification of numerous protocols into the directory. Today I can access NDS information by Novell's directory protocols, LDAP, ActiveX controls, Java Beans, ODBC applications (there have to be tons of those), via web pages, and now even Internet protocols such as RADIUS, DNS, and DHCP. Because of it's architecture I think that you will see more and more access protocols being layered on top of the NDS foundation. > NT's directory services, domains, provide this and have > appplications that actually use it. This consolidates mutliple > application directories and reduces TCO far more than NetWare's NOS > administration as pretty as it is. Microsoft has always had an advantage in the development of Windows APIs. Because of this, I would hope that there were more developers using these APIs ... if not I think it would indicate failure to accomplish a good developer story. But I'm not sure that I would agree that a lock on these APIs, and a large number of applications using them, actually relates directly to TCO. I will not claim to be an expert in Domains (although I know a couple) but I have heard customers explain much of the overhead of managing large distributed corporations with domains. Many seem to think that the redundant hardware requirements of PDCs and BDCs is very costly. Also, there seem to be complaints about the trust relationships that are required ... and sometimes give too many people too much control of the network. I'm sure that these are some of the issues that you are working to solve with Active Directory ... > I'll check out Border Manager again, it's been awhile. But the > reference sites all seem kinda small potatoes. You ought to check out UtahLink ... the Internet for the State of Utah School System: novell.com I did some research on this site for a while ... wild to see 67,000+ computers accessing the Internet through a single Dell Pentium PowerEdge 200Mhz box! I had some software that was measuring active HTTP connections and saw peaks of over 11,000(!) simultaneous IP connections. Now there have been two more boxes added to provide fault-tolerant failover and clustering ... so the cluster numbers are still impressive, but the single-box numbers are only a third of what they were. And these boxes aren't even breathing hard ... BorderManager is yet another product which capitalizes on the I/O engine that orginal NetWare was built on ... I would actually compare the kernel more to Cisco's IOS than the NT kernel ... I think you'll see the numbers continue to climb in performance ... > Keithsha Scott C. Lemon

To: keithsha who wrote (24218)	11/5/1998 1:02:00 AM
From: PJ Strifas	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42771

> As for your comment about directories, Novell positions it's > directory as providing single sign on and centralized management. Hello! I can't help myself to think that NetWare 5.0 will allow for contextless logins from ANY workstation. NT does this already??? Oh, you must be referring to roaming profiles which need to be created by an adminstrator and then managed across SEVERAL domains....this must be saving someone some $$$ right? Ok, let's move on here. Obviously you've never even seen NWADMIN or logged onto a real, production-level Novell Network which I may add is the ONLY NOS to earn C2 level security certification. PJ Strifas