* Trying to locate a Novell white paper throws up a 404 page and a Zen moment
Open Enterprise Server is seen by many as a migratory path from NetWare servers to Linux hosts. So, in order to prep you with some ideas about how this was a good thing, I headed over to the Novell Web site to find reading material.
I immediately found a link to a white paper called: “Strategic Value of Moving to Linux,” which seemed to be just what I needed. Of course, to get to it you need a Novell account. Once you’ve logged in, you need to fill out a survey. But after a few moments of concocting answers (and be sure to switch the “Yes” to a “No” on the “Would you like a Novell representative – i.e., salesman – to contact you?” button) I was able to hit the “submit” button (this actually took three tries as the form requires that every single field be completed!).
After no more than the usual interminable delay from the Novell Web server, I was greeted with the HTTP 404 page – “The page cannot be found (Url = https://www.novell.com/collateral/4621356/4621356.html) Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience. The page you are looking for may have been removed, its name may have changed, or it is temporarily unavailable.” (For all I know this will have been fixed by the time you read this. If so, try going to that URL – it might bypass the survey!)
At this point my back button didn’t work. Clicking through the path to that URL didn’t work either, every URL I tried automatically re-directed to the “lost” page.
Then I had a brainstorm – let’s try putting the title into the Novell search engine. Sure enough, it brought up a list of links to the file in a number of different languages:
* English Asia Pacific
* English U.S.
* French
* German
* Spanish Latin America
* View Online English U.S.
Other than the “view online” choice, the indication was that all of these were Acrobat PDF files. I hate PDF files. The Acrobat “reader” takes forever to load and actually makes reading a document harder, not easier. It does facilitate printing the document, but I only wanted to view the document online. So I clicked on that choice. Sure enough, there was the dreaded “404” error once again. So I resigned myself to getting the PDF file. Maybe I could go get some more coffee while it was loading. Hah! Once again, the now familiar 404 (in bright Novell red) popped up on the screen.
Time for another brilliant flash of insight. Perhaps there was a subtle kind of Zen-like philosophy at work here. When you ask “What’s the strategic value of moving to Linux,” the answer that’s returned is “none found.”
