Novell – If at first you don't succeed

My comment on Abort Retry Fail’s post:

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“This version brought NetWare Directory Services to the market in direct competition with Microsoft Active Directory.” – well, this is true if you have a time machine :) NetWare 4 was released in 1993, some seven years before Active Directory. Indeed, some clever Novell engineers figured out how to use NDS as a backend for the NT Security Accounts Manager (SAM) database, allowing NT domains (which until Active Directory were flat in structure) to take advantage of the hierarchical and distributed nature of NDS. Microsoft wasn’t too pleased with this by all reports.

Clearly, Active Directory won in the end, but whether this is due to engineering brilliance or Microsoft leveraging one monopoly to create another, I’ll leave it to the reader to decide.

Side note: in 2002 I started developing a plug compatible Active Directory replacement, XAD. I was able to leverage open source software such as OpenLDAP, Kerberos, DCE RPC and Samba 3 (for its file service; the domain controller implementation was written from scratch), but it still took me about five years to complete.

XAD was acquired by Novell in 2007 and, after some herculean efforts on the part of myself and Novell’s engineering team, was integrated with eDirectory (née NDS) and Open Enterprise Server (OES). Most of the Active Directory ‘personality’ lived on top of eDirectory but there was some deep integration in the core, for example to ensure that a user created over the native eDirectory protocols would still be assigned a NT Security Identifier (SID) when in DSfW mode. Recall this was done before Microsoft published any of the protocol documentation so, it involved quite a lot of protocol analysis.

DSfW I think is still part of OES but, Samba 4 will have long eclipsed it in functionality and bug-for-bug compatibility with Active Directory. I’m still proud of what we did and the great team at Novell in Provo and Bangalore. Most of the extensions to MIT Kerberos and DCE RPC were released as open source, which then found their way into Samba and macOS (respectively).

At early years of Ethernet, Novell have very unusual point of sale. Because network infrastructure was expensive, many companies worked on old thin coaxial an even on cheap 75Ohm (not 50 Ohm), so suffer wavelength issues.

What I mean, each network (to be exact, coaxial was bus topology), have distributed points, where due to wavelength issues machine don't hear other machines.

This solved by carefully selection of cable snippets of different length, until you could see targeted machine. Unfortunately, because of obvious computational limitations you cannot make everyone see everyone other machines on cable - in real life people choose to make seen server, and that time it obviously was Netware.

PS Yes, in 1996 we already have windows disk shares even on old 3.1, but due to described issues, only could reliable see Netware server, so have severe limited choices. In early 2000s, market flooded by cheap Ethernet switches, so all move to twisted pair and Netware become history.

My first internship was at a law firm just putting in their first Novell LAN. At my first real job, I put in the firm's first network, Novell of course. I was pleasantly surprised by how good the Novell network drivers were in Windows 95, indicating Microsoft knew where the enterprise market was.

I left a couple of years later when it was obvious the firm was going to move toward Windows NT for networking. It wasn't that I had anything against NT; the firm I went to work for already had NT in place. I just wanted to avoid the pain of converting 200+ users from one networking OS to another!

I worked for a local government in the early 90s. My swan song project was consolidating 50+ NetWare 3.11 to 6 production NetWare 4 servers. We repurposed the old hardware to run as GroupWise messaging gateways.

My most vivid observation was that we would periodically reboot servers just because they had been running steadily for over a year without problems or degradation in performance.

I still can't say that about any Windows product I've ever used, even to this day.

If at first you don't succeed: Abort, Retry, Fail?

An interesting trigger for memories from my early career. People who started work in the late nineties will not remember a time when it was extremely difficult to share files and data between PCs. We had things like laplink, where you could connect two PCs with a parallel cable, but no external drives or usb sticks, and floppy disks were too small. Connecting to a Netware network was what you did to share files and some applications like dBase, Paradox, and later Access were able to use network file-shared databases. Also, security was pretty lax (no firewalls or network-spread viruses), and the system administrator probably worked in the office and could create an account for you without any paperwork.

I ran my own Netware network but struggled to setup and configure, so my buddy always helped. Network cards were also a bit ropey and difficult to configure (before Win95), so on Windows you had to work hard to get your card to work across IPX/SPX and NetBEUI. It is also worth remembering that in the early nineties, TCP/IP wasn't in small office networks - The Internet was for universities and the like, and prior to Win95 on Windows you had to run Trumpet Winsock to get a TCP/IP stack.

I remember using novell networking less and less once Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was released (probably around 1993) because you could easily 'folder share' between PCs and once NT came along it was all over. NT 3.1 AS had a full tcp stack and ran SQL Server 4.21, and it was quickly followed by Win95 and NT 3.51. From 1995 file/print services for small offices were taken care of by Windows and 'plug and play' network cards that worked first-time.

This brought back some fond memories of writing courseware and teaching NetWare classes at a startup called Logical Operations. We published courses that were an alternative to the official Novell courseware for earning your CNA/CNE. I'm pretty sure I still have my CNE (and MCSE) pin in a box around here somewhere. One of my co-worker's classroom tricks was to establish a network connection via ARCNet over a length of barbed wire.

Logical Operations ran their own Novell network. I recall the server would freeze up periodically. Our admin rigged up a phone line and a relay...call the number and it would power cycle the server. That way, he didn't have to drive into the office to reboot the server at night. <shakes head>

From there, I started teaching DBase courses, which led to programming, which is where my career has been ever since.