NetWare's urban myths

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: DAVE KEARNS ON NOVELL NETWARE TIPS
07/19/05
Today's focus: NetWare's urban myths

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* What The Inquirer said about NetWare
* Links related to Novell NetWare Tips
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: NetWare's urban myths

By Dave Kearns

Some of you no doubt read The Inquirer. No, not the urban myth
spreading rag out of Florida, but the irreverent British IT news
Web site that says it prints "news, reviews, facts and
friction." Recently, The Inquirer carried a story about a
briefing session Novell ran in London to outline its Linux
strategy as well as to introduce Open Enterprise Server (see
link below).

While the writer got the overall flavor (or "flavour") right,
there were a number of, to me, annoying little errors that made
the story hard to accept and served to perpetuate a few urban
myths about NetWare and other operating systems.

The author didn't seem to grasp that there's a difference
between the NetWare kernel and the services that run on top of
the kernel. He seemed to feel that when installing OES, you
installed SuSE Linux and then put either Linux or NetWare
services on top of that. He then revived the urban myth that
older versions of NetWare ran on top of DOS! Now, I'd thought
that had been put to rest many years ago, but evidently it
hadn't.

NetWare never ran on top of DOS. A server was booted to DOS
solely to run the NetWare boot loader (a DOS program). It didn't
need to do that, it could have booted directly but that would
have required Novell to build its own BIOS loader to initialize
all of the hardware. The NetWare designers felt that there was
no need to reinvent the wheel, so let DOS handle that. Once the
NetWare boot loader ran, though, DOS was removed from the server
operation although it generally remained in memory so that, when
NetWare exited, it could be re-invoked rather than having to
re-boot the hardware. Novell even gave us the "Remove DOS"
command, ostensibly for security purposes (so that the server
couldn't be re-started without re-booting the hardware) but I've
always thought it was put there simply for those skeptics who
refused to believe that NetWare wasn't a DOS-based application.

Further adding to this myth, though (and also mentioned in The
Inquirer article) was the OS/2 version of NetWare. This did,
indeed, run as a service on the IBM OS/2 operating system. The
benefit to this was that you could run both a server session and
a client session simultaneously giving you a "network in a box"
solution that was a boon for those of us who needed to quickly
set up and take down a demonstration network. Nowadays, of
course, you can use VMWare to do that. That simply wasn't
possible to do on a single-threaded operating system such as
DOS.

A big tip of the hat to reader Igor Gervits for bringing the
latest instance of this urban myth to my attention.

RELATED EDITORIAL LINKS

SuSE's banshees crank up Novell enterprise wheel
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24516
_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Dave Kearns

Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. He's
written a number of books including the (sadly) now out of print
"Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks." His musings can be
found at Virtual Quill <http://www.vquill.com/>.

Kearns is the author of three Network World Newsletters: Windows
Networking Tips, Novell NetWare Tips, and Identity Management.
Comments about these newsletters should be sent to him at these

respective addresses: <mailto:windows@vquill.com>,
<mailto:netware@vquill.com>, <mailto:identity@vquill.com>.

Kearns provides content services to network vendors: books,
manuals, white papers, lectures and seminars, marketing,
technical marketing and support documents. Virtual Quill
provides "words to sell by..." Find out more by e-mail at
<mailto:info@vquill.com>
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Dupont
Reduce Fire Safety Risk in Your Network!

Concerns are rising about the growing number of combustible
cables present in buildings required to service the
ever-increasing demands of IT networks. More workstations are
taxing the infrastructure. These concerns are the thrust behind
new "limited combustible" cables that reduce fire safety risk.
Click here for news, a free demo CD and more. Visit DuPont's
Cabling center today!
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=108637
_______________________________________________________________
ARCHIVE LINKS

Archive of the Novell NetWare Tips newsletter:
http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/netware/index.html

Novell news page:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/financial/novell.html
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