By Thom Stark

Since its initial release in early September, 1998, Novell Corporation's NetWare 5 has proven to be surprisingly mature and stable for a dot-zero release. Although it currently lacks some key features to which users of earlier NetWare versions may be accustomed, it offers in exchange a new file system architecture, NSS, (Novell Storage Services,) that incorporates built-in support for NFS, Macintosh and long name spaces and blazingly fast volume mounting (but that does not yet support server file compression or block-suballocation.)

Recently, (June 8, 1999,) Novell released NetWare 5 Service Pack 2a, a 60-plus megabyte set of patches, updates and added features that NetWare 5 users will definitely want. It fixes problems with NetWare 5's SMS (Storage Management System) that prevented Veritas Corporation's Backup Exec for NetWare, Version 8 and Computer Associates' ARCserveIT for NetWare, Version 6.6 from operating properly (ARCserveIT's disaster recovery didn't work and Backup Exec jobs could only be run manually.) It also includes support for NAT, (Network Address Translation,) -- which, prior to the release of NetWare 5 Service Pack 1a, was only available as part of Novell's BorderManager product -- enabling Internet-connected NetWare 5 servers to leverage NAT's enhanced security and vastly expanded address space.

In addition to installing Service Pack 2a, there are a number of other steps most administrators will want to take to improve on NetWare 5's default configuration. The first of these is to invoke the NetWare 5 server with the -nl option to eliminate the Novell splash screen from obscuring potentially important console messages during startup. Another is to disable the almost entirely useless X-windows-based ConsoleOne "servertop" by commenting out the startx line in the server's AUTOEXEC.NCF file. (Although it looks pretty, the first release of ConsoleOne is much too slow and feature-poor to justify the demand it places on a server's resources -- and it has a nasty memory leak that will eventually cause the server to crash.)

Novell claims that its JVM (Java Virtual Machine) is the fastest one on the planet -- but, if you're not planning on running ConsoleOne, Java apps or the new, Java-based RconsoleJ on your NetWare 5 server, you can save 32 megabytes of server RAM -- and reduce server utilization -- by not loading it. (Just comment out the load java line in AUTOEXEC.NCF.)

If you're planning to use NAT, you should be aware that NLM-based MTAs (Message Transfer Agents) such as GroupWise will bind themselves to the first IP instance. That means that you will have to make sure that the public IP NAT interface is the first one to load, or you won't be able to receive Internet mail -- although you will be able to send it. To fix the problem, simply edit AUTOEXEC.NCF and change the order in which IP binds to your server's NICs, then restart the server.

If you initially bound IP to your server NICs in the wrong order and NIASCFG has transferred your load and bind statements to SYS:ETC/NETINFO.CFG, you will either have to delete and recreate the bindings in the proper order using NIASCFG, or edit the NETINFO.CFG file by hand. To make the changes manually, you must first delete NIASCFG's checksum file, SYS:ETC\NETINFO.CHK (it will be automatically recreated the next time you run NIASCFG.)

Then there's printing. Although Novell is determinedly herding its users away from NetWare's legacy printing architecture and toward NDPS, (NetWare Distributed Print Services,) it's still possible to maintain your existing printing environment under NetWare 5 -- with one major (and one minor) caveat: under NetWare 5, you can have only one print server and it must run as an NLM. All your existing stand-alone print servers must be converted to run as Nprinters. (Luckily, the latest Nprinter is much faster than any previous release.) The minor caveat is that, during bootup, the NLM-based print server will try to "grab" as many of your defined Nprinters as possible, so you may be forced to unload some defined Nprinters at the console and then re-log them in at the actual workstation in order to make them available to your users.

Finally, as of the end of June, only Symantec claims to have a server-based anti-virus solution -- Norton Antivirus for NetWare, version 4.0 -- that's compatible with NSS. Meanwhile, Stac Electronics appears to have given up entirely on its Replica Tape for NetWare product line. (Although its Replica Tape FAQ states that Stac intends to release a version with NSS support by late Summer, that's the only mention of NetWare on their site.) Replica's bare-metal disaster recovery and mountable tape volumes have been major assets for NetWare sites, so that's anything but good news for Big Red fans.

(Copyright© 1999 by Thom Stark -- all rights reserved)

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