OS/2 eZine

16 April 2001
 
R. Bret Walker Photo R. Bret Walker is a Certified NetWare Engineer who resides with his wife and two children in the South Jersey/ Philadelphia Metro area. He first became exposed to OS/2 in 1995, when Sony in northern New Jersey was looking for "an expert in NetWare who knows anything at all about OS/2." Although he ultimately turned down the job, he has since become an OS/2 junkie. A huge fan of the cinematic arts, in his spare time he writes reviews for and maintains The People's Reviews.

Any opinions expressed here are his own, and are not endorsed by, or necessarily representative of the opinions of the OS/2 eZine.


If you have a comment about the content of this article, please feel free to vent in the OS/2 eZine discussion forums.


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Novell, Inc.: Great NOS, Bad Attitude

Many of you may remember that I had endeavored in November to write a series of articles describing NetWare adminitration tasks from an OS/2 machine. The series was intended to be a three-part article, and the third part was to be the climactic piece de resistance, the unveiling of ConsoleOne in an OS/2 Java environment. I had, up until then, had ConsoleOne running in the OS/2 environment, but with some drawbacks, particularly the inability to actually do anything inside the ConsoleOne screen.

I had genuinely thought that this was a quirk unique to my environment. I have some engineering contacts in Novell whom I talked to about this very issue. Although none of them knew how to accomplish what I was attempting, they all seemed to agree that it should be very doable. After all, the ConsoleOne applet that I was using is the real McCoy. It's a pure Java applet that was developed to be used from the NetWare server console in the X-windows environment. Supposedly, any Java-based and NDS-aware system should be able to use that applet as long as the Java environment is set up correctly.

Much resarch, much more than I had intended, went into this project. Java developers were scratching their heads. Finally, it was an NDS programmer who came to the deadly conclusion: without a new version of the OS/2 client that uses the same API calls to NDS that the NetWare server does, there is no way that ConsoleOne will work with any operability under OS/2, even if the ConsoleOne java app does work (which it does, with some modifications.)

Now here is the kicker. Officially, Novell's opinion on this is, so what? OS/2 is a dead operating system.

Well, you and I both know that this is not true. However, I was in the Undernet OS/2 chat room discussing this very issue with the OS/2 community at large, and invariably their opinion was, so what? NetWare is a dead network operating system.

I cannot believe the stance of the OS/2 people regarding NetWare. NetWare is neither dead nor going away any time soon. Novell, under Dr. Eric Schmidt's guidance, has risen like the Phoenix from the ashes of the mess left by his predecessors, people who tried to spread Novell too thin with products such as WordPerfect. Under Dr. Schmidt, Novell has regrouped, cut off their dead limbs, and strengthened the body under NDS and eDirectory as the flagship products. No longer satisfied with having 60% of the market share in network servers, which they had in 1994 prior to the rise of Windows NT, Novell now concerns itself with providing connectivity products that tie disparate systems together under one common network platform. While Microsoft shipped more new software than NetWare in 1998, NetWare keeps a strong hold on the overall marketshare because more companies that use older versions of NetWare keep them. In fact, it's estimated that there are some 900,000 companies worldwide who are still using NetWare 3.12, which is a decade-old operating system. And today there are 139 million users of eDirectory services worldwide.

As I stated in my earlier series, Novell initially supported four client operating systems: DOS, OS/2, Macintosh, and Unix. They have since added Windows 9x, Windows NT, Solaris, and Linux. They have, however, dropped support for client connectivity via DOS, OS/2, and Macintosh. Fortunately for the Macintosh community, a third-party developer has picked up the reins and developed their own client which supports NDS API calls and pure IP connectivity. ProSoft Engineering's MacOS client is an excellent and fully functional client, but Macintosh users must pay $89US per seat in order to use it. ConsoleOne does operate in a Macintosh-based Java environment, primarily because the API calls necessary for the Java applet to communicate with the NDS database are all addressed in the ProSoft client.

Now, there has not been a new version of the OS/2 client since the first quarter of 1997, when Novell released its client version 2.12. There have been fixpacks released for this client, but they all address known issues and do not address either pure IP connectivity or the NDS API calls necessary for NetWare 5 administration. And as far as I can tell from my dealings with Novell, the OS/2 community has three options for getting a newer client:

1.Demand that Novell upgrade its client. Considering Novell's official stance on OS/2, I cannot see this ever happening.

2.Demand that IBM, which is still verbally and developmentally supporting OS/2, pick up the reins and release its own NDS aware client for OS/2. Based on my evalutation of IBM's actions in the past, IBM views NetWare as a competing product, and as such is unlikely to develop anything that makes it possible to connect to NetWare 5.

3.Develop a client of our own, which in the mindset of the opensource developer would be the natural choice. Since ProSoft Engineering has produced an excellent client for the Macintosh community, what is to stop an OS/2 developer to do the same for the OS/2 community?

Why doesn't the OS/2 community make more of an issue of this? Because they also view NetWare as a dead OS. Well, if Novell thinks OS/2 is dead, and the OS/2 community thinks NetWare is dead, what is to become of the OS/2 community? Which one, numbers-wise, do you think is less dead? And which one has more to lose by turning its back on the other? OS/2 is still a very stable client platform. However, while OS/2 will connect to NetWare 5 as a client, its lack of administration tools leaves it a very weak platform if someone were to want to do something functional in NDS such as, say, create a user or alter a login script.

The point to all this is this: the OS/2 community has to think long and hard about where we want our operating system to work for us, or we may be writing ourselves out of future connectivity products. The desktop has not been the focus in the IT world for some years, and probably never will again. Novell has tied a lot of operating systems together under one eDirectory umbrella, but have left OS/2 out in the rain. If OS/2 developers are serious about developing software for OS/2, then perhaps they ought to look toward the connectivity horizon and get us under the umbrella as well.

Links:

Novell Submits Research to Facilitate Key eCommerce Standard
NetWare Client 5.12 for MacOS - NetWare Connection, Feb 2000
Battle of the Big Boys in Networking
Network Operating Systems


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