Just need some info. =)

[Overdriven]

Alright, I've recently finished a college assignment about NOS and I did quite well; but I'm not satisfied with what I know ;o So, I thought I'd come here and see what you all have to offer...

I've written basics on Novell (NetWare) and Written about MS-S-03 but I want some more information!

What's the major advantages and disadvantage of using Novell and Unix?
(Their newest NOSs' available) And hell, any other NOS (Network OS) that there really is, that's used majorly.

Any answers would be cool ^^ Just want to learn more about this for next year ^^

*Waits*

 

[TdC]

I used to think that Novell was the greatest thing since sliced bread, back when I was pretending to be an admin of the stuff on 4.11 and 5 versions. I wasn't into the Unixen when they decided to decouple servers from NDS and build on the directory, and iirc the first thing that came out was NDS for linux.

I moved from Novell to Solaris and very big servers and kinda lost sight of what Novell were doing with their Directory product, and we have our own LDAP servers in place now that semi-replace the functionality of NDS without the coolness of the distributed directory. We replicate that a shade by having several LDAP server slaves in place which all talk to each other, but every node has to talk to an LDAP server about authentication instead of being able to test against it's own bit o' directory ofc.

Um pros and cons for Unixen vs Netware? Well, there are pros that are also cons if you follow me. For example Netware makes a server part of a larger entity, which is both good and bad: several servers or a chunk of network can fail and there will still be the entity (ie the directory) to work with, but the directory can also go wierd on you and servers will act strangely for seemingly no reason (which you will then be able to do fa about because the directory is syncing and fiddling with the server will do more harm than good).
Unixen with their delightful monolithic security environment is great for all things that do not touch the enterprise. Nearly every security product for any unix out there is made because a way was needed to get around the fact that your average user can do nothing and root can do everything. Unix hurts itself because of the great (not) concept of legacy, where root is still king and elaborate privilege dropping schemes and protective jails have to be made because you just can't get around the fact that root owns the first 1024 tcp ports on a unix server and all the major services run in those ports.

um, I ramble. ask me specific stuff

 

[Overdriven]

Hmm =O Good information actually *Saves*

Well, in the work I was doing I actually looked at the newest (not in detail) version of NetWare (6.5) and it just seemed blah.

So would you suggest working with yoonix other than MS/Nov? - What are the most common security flaws? How does it excell(sp) where the other two have failed? Does it keep you amused on the lonely nights at work? =D

I just really want to know anything. Write me a 15,000 word about Yoonix/Novell =D

 

[TdC]

So would you suggest working with yoonix other than MS/Nov?

not really. The trick is exploiting the strengths of the platform you have in regard to what you're doing with it. For example, in the environment I'm currently working in we have all (with some noted exceptions) workstations running XP hooked into the monstrosity that is Microsoft's AD. A large amount (1000's) of wintel servers running differing versions of MS' server product, again 1000's of Solaris servers and the same amount of AIX servers, about 20 mainframes (not the partitions of them, of differing models and off the top of my head 12 HP NonStop servers (which used to be called Tandems).

Sorry to the Doze people but mission critical applications et al just don't get run on wintel solutions. Large enterprises put that stuff on "proper" servers, scaling up to the mainframes and whatnot because that is where the scalability, proper fault tolerance and disaster recovery is at. Of course, it costs hella much. iirc a fully fitted out SF15000 sun server costs 5 million euros or so (we have 10 of those, just to give you an idea of the scale here) Even so, were I the IT bloke in for a small company, say up to 1k users, there would still be unix for the apps, because it's what I know and what I know to be good at what it does. Ofc, some wintel expert will prolly argue the point, and I'm willing to argue back, but I'm telling you what I know, not what I don't know

Anyway, back to the point, unix (I mean unix in general, not "just" Solaris or AIX or whatever) just rocks imo. It has all the buzzwords that management drool over, like as I said, scalability (you want 72 CPUs crunching away? more? no problem), dynamic reconfiguration (you want more CPU, disk, whatever, on the fly? Or less? no problem) you want capacity on demand (erk another buzzword heh, but no problem), disaster recovery (you want clusters? you want redundancy? multiple redundancy? multiple multiple off-site redundancy? no problem) I can go on forever. MS can not match that level of flexibility yet.
Ofc, there is the issue of "scariness". Unix is "scary" because there is a certain learning curve involved: people aren't used to GUI-less operations, you have to defend it to your management because it isn't shiny, with pretty colours and stuff. Show them a text console with some numbers and they freak out even though it's running Oracle parallel cluster buzzword version foo. They require pretty pictures, and so there is always hte defending and the translation from text to pictures.

I notice I'm ranting, so I'll get back to you later

 

[Overdriven]

Hehe ^^ Looks like I'll be getting into Unix some time soon Cheers for the information.



PS: I like rants =D

 

[Mellow]

Nothing wrong with Microsofts AD, it's quite simple to implement and use!

TdC just hates anything with a start menu that's all

 

[TdC]

Novell = better but you're right ofc

 

[Mellow]

I wonder if the intar-web looks scary from behind that big command prompt you sit behind!

 

[TdC]

I look at the flow green characters and to me they are pictures. Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.

 

[Mellow]

... and more to the point of the topic Active Directory is more than capable of managing thousands of Workstations and Servers.

Those that say otherwise are clearly not edu-ma-cated in such things