Novell NetWare

NetWare is a network operating system and the set of network protocols it uses to talk to client machines on the network. The NetWare operating system is a proprietary system using cooperative multitasking to run various services on a PC, and the network protocols were based on the archetypical Xerox XNS stack. Today NetWare supports TCP/IP as well as IPX/SPX. NetWare was one of a series of XNS-based systems, which also included Banyan VINES and Ungerman-Bass Net/One. Unlike these products, and XNS itself, NetWare established a strong presence in the market in the early 1990s, and managed to barely survive the onslaught of Microsoft's Windows NT which killed off the other players.

Netware evolved from a very simple concept : one or more dedicated servers were connected to the network, and shared disk space in the form of volumes. Clients running MS-DOS would run a special Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) program that allowed them to map a volume as if it was a local hard disk. Clients had to log-in in order to be allowed to map volumes, and access could be restricted according to the log-in name.

Similarly, clients could connect to shared printers on the dedicated server, and print as if the printer was connected locally.

While early Netware systems did entirely trust all modules (any misbehaving module could bring the whole system down), it was very stable. There are reports of Netware servers running for years without any human intervention.

History

Netware was based on the work of SuperSet (Drew Major, Dale Neibauer, Kyle Powell and Mark Hurst), based on their classwork at Brigham Young University, starting in October 1981.

Netware version 2 was notoriously difficult to configure : any change required a recompilation of the kernel, and a reboot of the system. Recompiling and reinstalling the kernel required about 20 diskette swaps.

Netware version 3 eased things a bit by modularization. Each functionality was controlled by a software module called a Netware Loadable Module (NLM) loaded either at startup or when it was needed. It was then possible to add functionality such as anti-viruses, backup software, long name support (remember, this was the time where filenames were limited to 8 characters plus a three letter extension) or Macintosh style files.

When your infrastructure contained more than one server, users had to log-in to each of them individually, and each server had to be configured with the list of all allowed users. Version 4 introduced the Novell Directory Services (NDS) where you described your infrastructure in a single place. Users could therefore access network resources no matter on which server they resided.

Later, Netware acknowledged the prominence of the Internet by switching from its proprietary IPX/SPX network protocol to TCP/IP, but that was during the time when Netware market share dropped, as it was massively replaced by Windows NT servers.

The latest release is version 6.5. Novell has announced an integration of Netware applications over a Linux kernel from its next release (version 7.0) Also, consequent to Novell's acquisitions of Ximian and SuSE, a German Linux distributor, it is widely observed that Novell may be moving away from Netware and shifting its focus towards porting applications over Linux. Officially though, Novell denies these claims and says it will focus on both Netware and Linux.

External link

• Netware home page
• Early history of Netware (PDF)