* Novell's six-point plan to get you on the road to OES
Let’s say you’ve decided to stick with Novell just a bit longer. Let’s further say that you’ve tentatively decided to migrate at least some servers to Open Enterprise Server. The question is (no, not “are you crazy?”) how to go about it – where do you start, what do you do first?
Novell wants to help.
It has published a list of six fairly straight-forward, relatively easy to implement projects that can have you working with the various parts of OES fairly quickly. (You can download the document here: https://www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserver/docs/oes_migration.pdf .) The six projects as defined by Novell are:
* Project One: Deploy New Stand-alone Novell iFolder 2.1 on Linux.
* Project Two: Upgrade Novell Queue-based Printing on NetWare to iPrint on Linux.
* Project Three: Move AMP [Apache, MySQL, PHP] from NetWare to Linux.
* Project Four: Set Up an iSCSI SAN on Linux.
* Project Five: Move eDirectory from NetWare to Linux.
* Project Six: Move Novell Storage Services from NetWare to Linux.
Some of you may be saying, “Wait a minute! Most of those projects involve moving from NetWare to Linux!” Well, duh. We’ve been telling you all along that the raison d’etre (that’s French for “marketing target”) for OES is to get you to move from NetWare to SuSE Linux.
What these projects can do is to allow you to familiarize yourself with the SuSE Linux kernel of OES by running the same applications on it that you’ve been running on your NetWare 6.0 or 6.5.
Each project begins with a description and a set of prerequisites (hardware and software requirements as well as the skills that you should be familiar with). Even before outlining the steps to take, the document tells you what to expect and what to look out for.
For example, the first project (installing iFolder on the Linux kernel) points out two things you should consider before starting the installation:
* Storage quota – “When setting the user storage quota upon installation, be sure you set it sufficiently high. After installation, you will have to increase each user’s quota individually; this can be a time-consuming process if you have hundreds or thousands of users.”
* Encryption – “When setting the encryption options during installation, you have the option of storing or not storing the users’ passphrases on the iFolder server. (Passphrases are used as the encryption keys.) Not storing them provides a higher level of security because only the user can decrypt the information. However, if the user leaves the company and the encrypted information is business-critical, you cannot decrypt it without the original user’s cooperation.”
Very important points, and ones that can’t really be salvaged (without a complete re-install) if you make the wrong decisions up front.
The iFolder project, in fact, is an excellent one to start with. It shouldn’t require that your users learn anything new and it shouldn’t require that you change any of your existing servers and services. It’s a very good way to learn about the new features of OES. Give it a try. You don’t even need to purchase OES, since you can run up iFolder on the evaluation copy of OES that you can download from Novell. What could be easier?
