Daily Archives: 1 October 2003

Wednesday Weltschmerz

Segway Lite. This guy here decided he
wanted a Segway but didn’t want to spend $5,000USD to get
one. So he built his own.

Ctl-Alt-Del. This guy here
was the guy who gave the world the three fingered salute. The
article is short but gives some general background into the
man who came up with the common key combination that everyone
now uses.

Novell 32 – Dan 0. My problems with the
Novell client continue. As a review, we have servers running
network operating systems (NOS) from Microsoft, Novell, IBM,
DEC, and Wang (Last time I looked, there were about 50
servers, including IBM mainframes.).

Each NOS has its good and bad points. But each requires
the loading of client software to login and interact with the
server. Some of these clients are fast and easy to use. Some
aren’t.

Up until one of our servers was converted to Netware 6.x
(the latest version), I used the Microsoft Client Services
for Netware (CSNW) that comes with Windows 2000/XP to access
our Novell Netware servers. The MS client is fast, bug free,
and works great with Netware 4.x and 5.x.

Compare this with the official Novell client that is full
of hundreds of bugs and causes all manner of problems with my
copy of WindowsXP. For example, boot time is increased by a
factor of at least three. Accessing Netware servers went from
almost instantaneous to 20 seconds. Running applications,
especially MS Office (what a coincidence – Ed.) on a Netware
server is a great excuse to go get a cuppa while you wait for
the hour glass to clear.

Once the Novell client is installed, uninstalling does not
clear the problems. The only thing to do is to reformat the
drive and install everything, except the Novell client.

But in my case, if I don’t use the Novell client when
connecting to a Netware version 6.x server, the MS CSNW does
strange things. While you do get logged in, drive mapping
does not seem to occur. Yet, if you manually map a drive to a
volume, the other drives magically appear. I don’t know why
this is happening but I guess I’ll be reformatting my drive
and starting over.

All I can say is Novell makes a terrific network operating
system. But their client software blows chunks leaves
much to be desired. Sigh.

Aloha!