NetWare administrators should be pleased that Novell will extend the same access controls and rights they use in NetWare to the company's Nterprise Linux Services, whose initial implementation is expected to ship this week.

Access controls specify which users or groups within an organization can access files or folders and what they can do after accessing them. When access controls are assigned to users or groups of users in NetWare, they are known as trustee rights, permissions, access privileges and access rights.

Novell says it will release Novell-style file management/file services on Linux in two releases next year. This release includes access rights and privileges, trustee rights and permissions.

"In the early release we plan to make a lot of the management capabilities, including the access control lists and some of the management tools available on existing Linux file systems, such as ReiserFS and ext3," says Ed Anderson, vice president of product management for Novell.

"Later in 2004, we are planning on releasing full file and print services for Linux," Anderson says. "In the second release, we plan to have the Novell File System running on Linux's Network File System."

In NetWare, access rights for files and folders are classed by the permission they involve - Access Control, Create, Erase, File Scan, Modify, Read, Supervisory and Write. Users can be assigned to groups, and within groups users can have different rights. In Linux, there are only three access rights - Read, Write and Execute - which, by contrast, are less detailed and flexible and don't let IT administrators create as secure file access.

IT managers say that having the same access control features they have in NetWare is critical to Linux.

"There are two reasons - the first reason is because we've come to know and love them," says Scott Hutchinson, network administrator for the Sheriff's Information Systems Costa County in Martinez, Calif.

"More importantly, if you don't have security that's controllable to the level of NetWare, a lot of the power and control [over file and directory access] is gone," he adds. Hutchinson has 12 NetWare 4 and 5 servers.

Hutchinson says with NetWare he can assign users to specific groups for specific purposes.