I thought I had finished in last week's issue talking about the new and improved features that will be included in NetWare 6.5, but even before that newsletter hit your inbox I heard from an old friend with some really exciting news.
Juniper's relationship with Packet Design
11/09/09
In our Oct. 26 WAN newsletter we discussed the fact that there were a number of rumors circulating about a dramatic move that Juniper would soon announce. On October the 29th Juniper used the New York stock exchange as a backdrop to make a series of announcements. We are doing to use this newsletter to focus on one piece of the Juniper announcements – Juniper's establishment of a close relationship with Packet Design.
Brocade, Oracle partner for database, SAN connectivity
11/09/09
In a sweeping announcement, Brocade and Oracle last week introduced a variety of solutions designed specifically for use with Oracle database and applications. Based on existing partnerships with NetApp, Sun/StorageTek and EMC, Brocade and Oracle have put together end-to-end networking packages for data warehousing, business applications and virtualization environments.
Juniper's relationship with Packet Design
11/09/09
In our Oct. 26 WAN newsletter we discussed the fact that there were a number of rumors circulating about a dramatic move that Juniper would soon announce. On October the 29th Juniper used the New York stock exchange as a backdrop to make a series of announcements. We are doing to use this newsletter to focus on one piece of the Juniper announcements – Juniper's establishment of a close relationship with Packet Design.
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If you ask 100 NetWare managers to name the area that they would most like to see improvement, odds are that the majority would mention auditing services. As one fellow said, "Our customers have been demanding better auditing capabilities." And that fellow happens to be Ed Anderson, Novell's director of product management. I've known Ed for a number of years and I respect his judgment, especially when he's telling me what's wrong in NetWare.
Network managers have seemingly always been interested in knowing the comings and goings of their users. They also like to be able to track the use of corporate assets and be able to identify who did what to whatever, each time a file gets moved, a trustee assignment gets changed or a directory object goes missing.
Accounting services in NetWare 3 was a first stab at tracking some of this activity, until someone realized that the network administrators needed to be tracked at least as well as the users. So NetWare 4 saw the introduction of auditing services with the implementation of a new role on the network - the Network Auditor. This wasn't necessarily a network supervisor - it might not even be an IT person. But only the auditor could read the audit trails and logs to see who was doing what to whatever and when it was occurring. But Auditcon, the facility used to view and control auditing services, was never very user friendly.
In an attempt to both improve the usability of auditing as well as to streamline the auditing process, Novell introduced the Novell Advanced Audit Service (NAAS) with NetWare 6. Not only was this attempt unsuccessful, but NAAS may be the single most excoriated service in NetWare 6. That's quite an accomplishment.
When users asked me about auditing in a NetWare environment, I always mentioned a product I started using back in my NetWare 3 days, LT Auditor, from Houston's Blue Lance software. I've known Blue Lance's CEO, Umesh Verma, since he started selling LT Auditor in 1990, but his involvement with auditing and monitoring NetWare goes back even further. LT Auditor is the successor to his first product, LanTight (thus the "LT" in LT Auditor) which was introduced in 1985. That's almost 20 years slowly tweaking and improving a product that was exceptionally good even 15 years ago. Now you can take advantage of that work.
Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. He's written a number of books including the (sadly) now out of print "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks." His musings can be found at Virtual Quill.
Kearns is the author of two Network World Newsletters: Windows Networking Strategies, and Identity Management. Comments about these newsletters should be sent to him at these respective addresses: windows@vquill.com, identity@vquill.com .
Kearns provides content services to network vendors: books, manuals, white papers, lectures and seminars, marketing, technical marketing and support documents. Virtual Quill provides "words to sell by..." Find out more by e-mail.
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