News from PANUG  - July 13, 2001
http://www.panug.org
info@panug.org

SPAM LIST
In our never ending quest to reduce spam, we're going to add
domain names to our email black list from a list that has been
compiled by the Ziff-Davis folks.This list is available at:

http://www.znet.com/spammers.txt

You may want to check to see that your domain is not on the
list.

PANUG's email server, which is also used by the BizNix user group,
the Accelerated Learning Center, and a few other organizations
regularly turns away several hundred spam messages each month.
PANUG members can take advantage of this by asking for a
email redirection account. This is described on the following web
page:

http://panug.org/benefits.htm#email

NOVELL and APACHE
by Ed Sawicki

Thursday afternoon I attended Novell's monthly reseller session
where the main topic was Novell's new iChains product. The product
provides a way for computer users to store data files on their
local hard drives while ensuring that the data is also stored on
your server where it can be protected, backed up, etc. I will not go
into the details of the product features and benefits here. PANUG
will cover the functionality of this product in a monthly meeting
soon.

In this article I want to focus on how the product was put together
and what's required to run it. This will give you insight into Novell's
future direction and what skills you may want to have to keep
your career on track - regardless of whether you use NetWare.

iChains will be included with NetWare 6 and will be available
separately. The product does not depend on NetWare or NDS and
does not work better or worse if you use NetWare. It's a totally
NetWare agnostic product. The server side of this product can currently
run on NetWare or any 32-bit version of Windows. However, I know of
no reason why Novell couldn't make it work with any other operating
system such as Linux, Macintosh, etc.

At the heart of the product is Apache - the world's most popular
web server. iChains cannot work with any other web server. The
introduction of iChains signals the end of Novonix and Novell's
involvement with the Netscape Enterprise Server. The server-side
piece of iChains is an Apache module written by Novell. This
modules works in concert with one or more other modules
written by the open source community, such as the Apache
LDAP module.

Yes, iChains use LDAP for user authentication - not NDS. Of
course, if you're running iChains on a NetWare platform, NDS
has a LDAP interface so you can authenticate to NDS if
you choose. You can also authenticate to a database running on
Windows. You can probably authenticate to the user database
on your company's telephone switch :-)

The message here is that Novell is yet another vendor whose
business is changing in fundamental ways. They're embracing
open source software to get products to market faster and have
those products be compatible with almost anything else out there.
Novell is being innovative and your career should be keeping up
with innovation. The closed source, expensive, proprietary, only
works with itself products that you're using now are a dead end.
Your management simply doesn't know it yet.