* Avanti Technology's TaskMaster
Rexxware is a scripting language for NetWare that was first developed by Simware 10 years ago. Over time, Simware was acquired by NetManage, best known for its DOS and Windows-based Chameleon TCP/IP stack, which first shipped almost 15 years ago. Simware is also the current purveyor of Rumba, the mainframe access package for Intel platforms, which it acquired when it purchased Wall Data.
Simware is no longer developing Rexxware, but the last release (Version 2.02) can be downloaded from the company’s Web site, although it is unsupported. This was all pointed out to me by faithful reader Marie-Anne Ellyton, who discovered that upon upgrading to NetWare 6.x her Rexxware would no longer run and Simware wasn’t interested in helping her get it running. Since she’d come to rely on her scripting environment to help manage her servers, this was a problem.
I suggested that she look into Perl. While Perl is much more sophisticated (i.e., harder to learn) than Rexxware it’s still easier to use than, say, C++. And it does run on NetWare (see https://developer.novell.com/ndk/doc/perl5/index.html?page=/ndk/doc/perl5/prl57enu/data/h4cr34aj.html).
According to dictionary.com, Perl is “a high-level programming language, started by Larry Wall in 1987 and developed as an open source project. It has an eclectic heritage, deriving from the ubiquitous C programming language and to a lesser extent from sed, awk, various Unix shell languages, Lisp, and at least a dozen other tools and languages.” (It would be nice at this point to note that Larry Wall was the founder of Wall Data, but he wasn’t so it isn’t. Darn.)
In a moment of stupendous brain cramp, though, I neglected to mention to Ellyton that there was another possibility – and one that has graced the pages of this newsletter before. I refer, of course, to Avanti Technology’s flagship product, TaskMaster (and its baby brother, TaskMaster Lite).
TaskMaster was first released in 1994, the same year as Rexxware. Over the years, it has developed a tremendous, loyal following of network managers who rely on it for many different server-based tasks. To discover all that TaskMaster can do for you, you’ll need to visit Avanti’s Web site. I should warn you, though, that updating the look of the Web site isn’t a high priority for Avanti CEO Steve Meyer. Don’t let the look put you off. TaskMaster is the ideal NetWare server tool. It provides excellent scripting facilities and a whole lot more.
Perl is best used in conjunction with the Apache Web server running on NetWare. It provides a fairly easy way to add much additional functionality to Web services. But for monitoring and controlling NetWare servers, TaskMaster is the ideal scripting tool.
