NetWare connectivity with Apple Mac

By Dave Kearns
Network World NetWare Newsletter, 09/30/02

Last week's Wired Windows column in Network World (see editorial links below) about Apple marketing and networking really raised the ire of many Mac Maniacs. While most of what they said was irrelevant to my point that enterprise networks need professional network managers, it did pique my interest in networking the newest Macintosh machines running the latest Mac operating system (OS X).

It has been a while since we really explored connectivity in this newsletter, so over the next few issues we'll look at how you can maintain a heterogeneous network, made up of machines running multiple operating systems all under the control of NetWare. We'll start, today, with the Macintosh.

Novell first introduced NetWare for Macintosh in the late 1980s. I first encountered it with NetWare 2.15, but it may have been released for 2.12 (I just haven't tracked down the release date yet). In any case, the surprising part of this product was that there was no client needed for the Mac. Once installed on your network, NetWare for Mac allowed your NetWare server to appear as if it were an AppleServer whenever a Mac client wanted to connect.

This was revolutionary in the networking business and was just one more reason why Novell was seen as the leader in LANs. Microsoft networks at that time were MS-Lan and LAN Manager. MS-Lan didn't support Macs and LAN Manager severely limited the Mac's activity and forced changes in the Mac's behavior.

When NetWare 3 was released, an upgraded NetWare for Macintosh was released alongside it. Organizations that had a handful of Macs in their computer mix gladly installed NetWare so that their DOS, Windows and Mac computers could all participate together in the network.

NetWare 4 and the advent of NDS/eDirectory led to hard times for Macs on NetWare. It didn't help that Macintosh market share was dwindling and there was talk (this was the early 1990s) of Apple going belly-up. Little, if any work on Mac connectivity was happening in Provo.

Novell eventually jobbed out Mac connectivity to ProSoft Engineering, a leader in custom programming for the Mac platform. In fact, ProSoft (www.prosofteng.com/index.php) has just released a Macintosh NetWare client for OS X (This is an " IP only " client, it requires NetWare 5.x or 6.x).

Between NetWare 5 and 6, though, Novell had another change in thought and pulled back some of the things it had outsourced to ProSoft so that Macintosh connectivity could be included in Novell's Native File Access Protocol, which is part of NetWare 6.

Once again, a Mac could see a NetWare server as if it were an AppleServer. The Macs could get the same file and print services with NetWare that they could in an all-Mac network. Alternatively, you can purchase ProSoft's client software and actually administer your NetWare installation from a Mac platform. For the Macintosh, NetWare life is good. But what about NetWare connectivity with other operating system platforms? Stay tuned.