News from PANUG  - August 2, 2001

WINDOWS PRODUCT ACTIVATION
Bruce Yatvin points out this article critical of Microsoft's
product activation in Office XP and Windows XP:

http://www.win2000mag.com/articles/index.cfm?articleID=21579

The article suggests that reinstalling Windows is necessary
to fix many Windows-oriented problems but product activation
will make this difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Your
third-party disk cloning products and, perhaps, ZENworks will
no longer work like they do now. The article states that 60
percent of people surveyed said they would not move to XP if
it had product activation. They'll have to stay with older
versions of Windows or switch to other operating systems -
the article mentions Linux but don't forget that Apple Computer
is still selling computers that many people still like.


NETWARE 6 AND FILE SYSTEMS
by Ed Sawicki

Beta copies of NetWare 6 are available as well as white papers
on new features, such as iFolders, included with NetWare 6. For
details, visit:

http://www.novell.com/NetWare6/

One thing to keep in mind as you ponder what your future
server operating systems will be: NetWare file servers offer
reliable, high-performance, secure, journaling file systems
that support file sizes up to 8 Terabytes (TB or TiB). These
file systems never need to be defragmented and seldom, if
ever, need to be repaired.

While Linux offers many of the same features, the current
Linux file size limit is 2 Gigabytes (GB or GiB). This
limitation is not a problem for most applications, but could
be for database applications.

One non-technical thing that may influence your decision is
that NetWare and Linux come from benevolent entities. Even
though NetWare is not free, its total cost of ownership (TCO)
is low and Novell is not constantly trying to figure out new
ways of getting you to pay them money or locking you in to
their products.

APACHE TRAINING
Apache is a web server, immune to attacks such as Code Red,
that runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and NetWare. PANUG is
co-hosting a 2-day Apache training class on September 5-6.
For details, visit PANUG's web site at:
http://panug.org