NEWS FROM PANUG - February 12, 2001 http://www.panug.org info@panug.org $1295 FOR A KEYBOARD? If you're serious about fighting carpal tunnel syndrome, and you'd have to be to spend $1295 for a keyboard, check out the following web site. http://www.datahand.com/home2.html WORDS NOT IN THE DICTIONARY A few years back, PANUG email broadcasts had wacky word definitions. We're resurrecting them. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly. WHAT'S NOVELL UP TO? by Ed Sawicki Acelerated Learning Center http://alcpress.com I've been writing about Linux and open source software lately because it's been a break from the awful world of marketplace politics and monopolies. But Novell and their excellent products have been ignored since nobody else is writing about them here. So, let's talk Novell. Novell seems to have noticed that companies can still make money by embraceing open protocols and open source software. They may have learned this from IBM that has a strong committment to open source. This year, IBM estimates that it will spend one BILLION dollars on development of products based on open source softare. They estimate that this spending will increase in the next few years. If you or your management think that open source software is a fad that wil go away because you don't understand the economic model, one billion dollars should be something you can relate to regardless of whether you understand the model or not. Novell seems to understand this because they're basing their future products on open protocols and open source software as well. Let's look at some examples of Novell's new strategies. NOVELL AND CLIENT SOFTWARE Anyone who's ever worked with NetWare has installed client software on workstations. In the early 1980s, we installed the NetWare shell which was a problem at times because it consumed over 50 kilobytes of precious conventional memory in the early days - more later. For the past several years we've installed Client32 whose memory requirements increased by orders of magnitude. We tend not to be concerned with consuming memory resources these days because we can use as much memory as we can put in our machines. Memory consumption is not our greatest concern. A far greater problem is the continual threat of Novell's client software being rendered inoperable by changes Microsoft makes to the operating system. You'd know this is a real concern if you've ever read the Findings of Fact in the Microsoft case. http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm A solution to these problems is to eliminate client software. Instead of using Novell's proprietary NCP protocol, perhaps we can use an open protocol like HTTP. HTTP isn't ideal for this as is. It doesn't have features that we need like file and record locking. But another layer can be placed on top of it and this layer can be far smaller than the existing client software. It would be difficult for Microsoft to sabotage this without breaking their own software. Novell is looking into doing this and we should encourage them. Such a scheme could also replace Microsoft's proprietary and inefficient SMB protocol but this would, regrettably, require their cooperation. Novell has released the NetWare Management Portal HTTP Stack Interface to developers. This provides a set of APIs that allows applications to interact with a remote workstation using HTTP. While not meant to be a general purpose client/server interface, this is an example of Novell's push in that direction. NOVELL PORTAL SERVICES Mike Ellerbe from the local Novell office recently demonstrated Novell's Portal Services (NPS) at a monthly Novell reseller meeting. This is an impressive product and PANUG will try to arrange a presentation at one of its monthly meetings. Of considerable interest to me was Novell's claim that it is a totally standards-based, multi-platform solution. NetWare and NDS are not required to make it work. You can base it on NetWare, Windows NT/2000, Solaris, or Linux. Any portal service is based on the HTTP protocol because users use their web browsers to access the portal. This means that any portal service requires the use of a web server. If you're using NetWare, Windows, Solaris, or Linux, you can use Apache with NPS. You can use NPS with Microsoft's IIS but you're married to the Windows platform. Novell does not yet support the Netscape web servers on platforms other than NetWare (Novonics). So, it appears that Apache has become Novell's premier cross-platform web server. Apache is open source software and the most popular web server on the planet. Novell's Portal Services is also based on Tomcat - an application service platform that is based on standard Java servlets. This is also open source software and also produced by the Apache team. Topcat will work with any of the web servers mentioned above making it multi-platform as well. NPS is a directory-enabled service but it doesn't need NDS. It uses the standard LDAP interface/protocol to communicate with an underlying directory such NDS, AD, a SQL database that may also be open source and multi-platform, etc. Novell is offering multi-platform, open solutions and this is a good thing. Even if you don't use their products you should keep up to date on what they're doing. Novell is one of the barometers of change.