At 02:40 AM 10/31/00 , you wrote:
>1) Is NetWare a reasonable beast to administer, they have the license already,
> the setup is pretty stable (after 10 months of screwups & problems!)
> and I'm
> thinking that there is no point going in there and changing
> everything. Will
> I be able to us my prior sysadmin knowledge to guess how to do most stuff?
> Should I let the sleeping dog lie? Or should I try to teach it new
> tricks?:)
We have an old NetWare installation that hums for us as a file- and
print-server. Our only complaint is that there are weird, occasional
printing problems from our Windows 9x workstations which we suspect is an
incompatibility between Windows and NetWare. I don't know about NetWare
5.x, but older NetWare seems to me to be very related to and, similar to,
DOS. I think you still need a DOS partition to install NW 5. I would
think a UNIX admin would prefer NW to NT in that it comes with a CLI.
I would stay with NW as long as it runs well but I would favor a
Linux-based solution for new services for several reasons: (1) cost - this
one shouldn't be on the list, but it pains me to decide to spend thousands
upon thousands of dollars for NW when Linux is close to free; but more
insidiously, (2) the fact that Linux is free means you can more easily
spread services around--as it is, we have to (of course) run all NLM
software on the one NW server (this was recently painful when we tried
migrating mail off the NW server to an NT-based version of the same mail
software... authentication against the NW bindery would fail about 20% of
the time!) (3) Linux has a lot of free software to provide standard
services; (4) Linux software tends to be more fully featured and better
updated (this varies though); and (5) using Samba to emulate NT, I think
Linux can cozy with Windows better than NW.
Also, the two big reasons not to use Linux used to be: (1) no applications
and (2) no hardware support. Obviously, in a server context, these are
pretty weak arguments these days.
Performance wise, I think they're probably comparable. I'm sure there are
contexts in which each would beat the other. On a gross level, our
heavily-used NW server crashes about once every 4-6 months. NT admins
would call that "rock-solid" and it's not too painful for us. Since the
Linux machines aren't taxed as much, I cannot say what they would do under
the load but I think they might be a shade more stable.
From your post it wasn't clear what other IT staff this company has. If
they *don't* already have a NW admin, then you're going to have to learn a
lot fast (maybe sufficient reason to switch although I would just learn
NW). If they *do* have an admin, I think you should consider the politics
for a moment. You'll probably lose that person if you don't include them
in decision-making.
-Alan
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