Posts by algorithm&blues

BOFH: On the contrary, we LOVE rebranding here at the IT dept

I spent a couple of years working in a governmental support contract on the Remote Infrastructure Management team....

Yep, when incidents got passed over to us "Hey, I've got another rimjob for you!"

How Novell peaked, then threw it all away in a year

ConsoleOne/NDS for all it's slaggings it gets, in 6.5 could do things that Active Directory 10 years on still doesn't do by default.

Want to know what workstations a user is logged into from a central base? Two clicks away in ConsoleOne. In AD? Without installing cumbersome third party (not including Terminal Servers) it's very difficult.

Amending folder permissions? In NDS, just change the permission in one place - hey presto, 2 seconds work. In AD? Click, hope, and leave your computer on all night!

You can repeat it ad nauseum: ABEND vs. BSOD, Novell clustering V Microsoft clustering.....

I often wonder how Novell actually lost that battle?

How the clammy claws of Novell NetWare were torn from today's networks

The ABEND

Admittedly my Netware exposure only started from 6 onwards, but I was a very big fan of the ABEND - whereas an MS box would BSOD and cause outage, an ABEND on Netware, especially in something like BorderManager (oh, the mercy!) would most of the time allow us to "limp on one leg" through to the end of the working day, where a proper scheduled restart could take place.

Saved me a massive amount of management trouble, especially as the previous support people had massively unbalanced their BorderManager set up (4000 users going through one server, 20 through another, and 5 through the last one)