NetWare 6.5

Today was the first time I have played with NetWare since version 4.11. NetWare 4.11 was also known as Intranetware and contained a host of improvements. NetWare 4 also introduced NDS - Novell Directory Services several years ahead of Active Directory.

I did briefly touch NetWare 5 during a migration of a companies NetWare 5 server to our Windows NT4 environment but I never had the chance to really look at it to see what changes had been made so this was the first real chance I have had to get back into NetWare until just recently,

NetWare has changed between a lot between NetWare 4 and 6.5. Whilst it still requires a hefty chunk of memory at start you can tweak it by removing things like the seriously memory intensive JAVA GUI front end and running with the really 1980s style front end.

Don't let the old style menus fool you though because NetWare still has some amazingly capabilities that you pay a small fortune for on other platforms.
Out of the box NetWare is still far superior as a file server compared to a Windows server. It's quota configuration really is years ahead of Microsoft's or even NetApp's quota system.

Like NetApp a NetWare server can be a storage target for both Windows and Unix/Linux (NFS) platforms but unlike NetApp a NetWare server has a lot more tricks up it's electronic sleeves. One of the really nice features is the Novell Remote Manager pictured on the right. This is a damn useful web tool for monitoring your server and seeing exactly what is going is. This is something Microsoft and Linux both lack.

It's a shame that the general thought in the IT industry is that Novell is close to dying or being bought out because it is stopping NetWare making even a tenth of the sort of inroads in had in the past and I really don't see this changing at anytime.