Thursday, March 24, 2005

Novell Open Enterprise Server

Last week, I went to a class for Novell Partners on Open Enterprise Server - the transitional NetWare 6.5 that's based on SuSE with all the NetWare services ported over. I was duly impressed - the released product fits right into the typical NetWare shop - it can be managed as just another server in the tree and even ports over the NWCONSOLE so users can have the familiar CLI available. For ConsoleOne users, that's missing, but otherwise it's pretty much the same old. The base file system is now EXT-based, but it's transparent. And since it's Linux under the hood, you can now run all your Linux application processes on it instead of relying on NLM's.

Combined with the current NLD 9 (and the just-announced-at-Brainshare NLD 10), Novell is making a strong case for Linux throughout the enterprise, as well as finally providing an attractive migration path for the legacy NetWare users besides Windows 2003. The tough part will be getting the last of the NetWare 3.x users to move up - there's still a lot of them out there (like my old company), and nobody's really doing a great job of luring them.

Thursday, March 17, 2005

More about location

As mentioned in the previous post, we will be moving to the auditorium for future meetings - beginning in May. Our April meeting, however, may be held at a different on-campus location. If that is the case, it will likely be the "Blue Room" in Shaw Hall, where we have held some meetings in the past. When we have confirmation, the info will be posted here, on the BNUG website, and in the reminder e-mail we send out before the meetings.

Monday, March 07, 2005

Meeting Location Change

As of right now, we expect our next several meetings to be held in the auditorium at Mount Ida's student center, instead of the usual meeting room at the Institute. The student center is the large building directly in front of you when you drive past the guard shack - park in the lot on your left. Any other changes will be posted on the regular BNUG website - please check the site for details.