A place for you to ask Novell questions

Maybe I spend too much time with marketing people these days and not enough time with the engineers. It never used to be that way, but Novell, like most technology companies today, wants to thoroughly control the information that gets out.

Maybe I spend too much time with marketing people these days and not enough time with the engineers. It never used to be that way, but Novell, like most technology companies today, wants to thoroughly control the information that gets out.

That’s not really a bad idea; the current regulatory environment in the U.S. coupled with the litigious nature of a company’s stockholders, partners and rivals makes information control a desirable – from the company’s perspective – and even a necessary activity. Still, there are ways to get the “real skinny,” which I’ll share with you provided you don’t let the information go any farther. (See, I can do my own form of “information control”.)

After some recent newsletters in this series concluded that Novell really wasn’t actively seeking to improve NetWare, one reader decided to take me by the hand (figuratively) and show me where the real information was.

He suggested I “just read the developer-forums.novell.com newsgroup, mainly the libc forum.” Evidently these support forums, which have traditionally been staffed by marketing, tech writing and help desk staff have now been opened up so that the people coding Novell’s applications are encouraged to contribute.

Reading these newsgroups points out that Novell is still enhancing the NetWare Libraries and, especially, the NetWare kernel. Soon we’ll have “process” natively supported by the kernel – a big change from the current “multi-threaded-only” kernel. As my reader pointed out, “Say goodbye for the entire [operating system to be] down because of one bad NLM!” As to why this is true, either you’d need to be an engineer for me to explain it or you should head to the support forums where the real engineers WILL explain it.

The reader also reminded me that many Unix-based and open source protocols, services and utilities (such as SYSLOG, BASH, POSIX APIs, POSIX file system, and so on) are still targeted for NetWare 7, while the Java Virtual Machine team is impatiently waiting for the process-based kernel so they can enhance the virtual machine.

Evidently, things aren’t so moribund in Provo as I was led to believe. If you want to know for yourself, check out those newsgroups. But if you really want to know what’s coming, sign up now to be a beta tester for Open Enterprise Server. Head over to https://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/oes_beta_survey.html and sign up. There’s no better way to find out what’s coming then to have the actual software running in your lab.