Novell uptimes

[Jonathan Hutchins, Rune Webmaster]

----- Original Message -----
From: "mike neuliep" <mike at illiana.net>

> Just to time in, I work for one of those fortune 500 companies (Andrew
Corp)
> and we still have a lot of Novell out there, probably about 50 or so
servers
> in the enterprise.  ... With the help of UPS, someof them have had uptimes
of
> over a year.

Most of the Netware servers I worked with didn't actually crash that I can
recall.  Some of them would get wierd and start messing with files or access
rights or deny logins, but the one or two that outright locked up or crashed
could probably be attributed to hardware.  Bad hardware will crash just
about anything.

> The only downside of having novell is it's client sucks rotten eggs
> and that has caused major problems in the past.  If you don't actually
need
> the novell client, I'd suggest using the microsoft client.

> Due to the economic slowdown we are going to delay the
> replacement of them with win2k.  Reason is they are stable and we
currently
> don't want to spend the money on win2k licensing.

At some point though, you're going to have to take a real bite because the
jump to new systems is going to be so much farther.

> Personally I'd like to see Linux as our server install base, but that'll
never happen at Andrew.

I think you could have a chance there.  Feedback I'm seeing on Win2K is
pretty unfavorable - NT with some of the worst window dressing from Win98,
an incredible resource hog, not significantly better at _anything_, etc.  If
you were to pitch the idea of say IBM supported Linux servers that didn't
have the license issues you just might get by with it!