* The porting of NetWare to Linux - a hit or miss?
Last issue we talked about the change in direction at Novell as it moves what we’ve come to know as “NetWare services” to the Linux platform. Traditionally, of course, NetWare services have run on the NetWare operating system, but there have been other attempts to run NetWare on other platforms. The fact that many of you may not be aware of this shows how unsuccessful that venture was.
In the late 1980s Novell launched something called “Portable NetWare”, also known as “Platform Independent NetWare” (you can always tell a product is in trouble when the name is changed). This was a bundle of most of the traditional NetWare services ported to run on minicomputer and Unix platforms based on the release called “NetWare 386” (the original name of NetWare 3.0).
Targeted platforms were those from Data General, Digital, HP, IBM (both s/360 and AIX) and Sun (although I don’t believe a version for Sun’s servers was ever shipped). None got past a “Version 1.1” release, and only the Data General version seemed to garner much support from either the platform manufacturer or the user base. That version still was installed into the mid-1990s in a few places but “Platform Independent NetWare” was a thing of the past.
The name “Portable NetWare” was almost resurrected in 1996, though, when Novell made noises about running NetWare services on Unix, Windows NT and OS/2 (yes, OS/2 was still a young, viable system in those days). The NT version was stillborn, and the Unix version only made it onto a single platform (UnixWare, which was owned by Novell at the time). Only the OS/2 version showed any life. Typically, this was because under OS/2, the CPU and RAM of the hardware platform could be partitioned so both the server and the client could run on one machine. It was a boon for those looking to show demos of NetWare (much as VMWare is today), but not especially useful in the real world.
A few years ago Novell signed with IBM and Apple to provide a version of NetWare that would run on the PowerPC CPU that IBM was developing. While Apple came out with a Macintosh OS for the PowerPC, Novell never delivered on its part of the deal.
That’s a miserable track record, to be sure. But we shouldn’t overlook the very first time NetWare was ported to a different platform. Initially, you see, NetWare was designed to run on a very specific hardware platform based on the Motorola 68000 CPU. When IBM introduced its first PC, though, all the NetWare (then called “Sharenet”) designers rushed out to buy a model. They liked what they saw of the new Intel x86 architecture so they started right away porting their networking system to the new platform; and so “NetWare” was born. All in all, it has to be considered a very successful port.
It’s too early to tell if the move to the Linux kernel as the platform for NetWare services will echo the success of Sharenet’s port to the Intel architecture or the failure of the various Portable NetWare implementations. Time will tell, but there’s not a lot of time. Novell’s “Services for Linux” due out this fall had better be both complete and relatively bug free. It better be available on almost all Linux distributions, and it better be supported by almost all Linux distributors. When Novell tried to bridge to other OSes with Portable NetWare it was able to run back across the bridge when the new products failed in the marketplace. This time, though, Novell has set fire to the bridge. That path is no longer open.
