* Will Novell Storage Services be part of Netware 7 on Linux?
All of the talk about the “death” of NetWare certainly has stirred up a lot of discussion about Novell. The uproar and subsequent finger-pointing and denials almost completely overshadowed the news that the former Provo-based company had purchased Linux tool provider, Ximian.
I’m going to overlook that piece of news now, myself, but we will talk about that just as soon as I can figure how purchasing yet another money-losing company (to go along with Cambridge Technology Partners and SilverStream Software) can improve the bottom line. For today, I want to look at one small facet of Novell’s move to the Linux platform.
A number of NetWare network managers have told me that as long as NetWare’s file services can be moved to Linux, they won’t mind making the transition to the new platform. When pressed, what they really seem to want is the ability to control file and folder access with the same rich set of attributes they’ve come to know and love with NetWare. The ability to control who can read, write, create, erase and modify files and folders using a combination of direct assignment to individuals and groups, as well as through inheritance from parent folders and other objects in the tree creates an environment that is at once very secure but also very flexible.
Linux shows its Unix roots in the manner and method of assigning file and folder manipulation attributes. A directory listing in Linux (“LS” for those who use it), will show file permissions (normally called “mode”) as a 10 character field which might look like “-rw——-” or “drwx-x–x”.
The first character is either a “d” (for directory or folder) or a dash, “-“, (for a file). This is followed by three groups of three characters each. The three groups are the “owner” of the file, the “group” the owner belongs to, and all “other” (in Unix jargon) users of the system or what is sometimes referred to as the “world”. When the owner belongs to more than one group, either a default group or a specifically chosen one gets the “group” privileges. Only one group can be so designated for each file/folder.
Within the three groups, there are three attributes, or privileges – Read, Write and eXecute. The privileges associated with these attributes differ slightly for files and folders. If a class of users has read permissions for a directory, then anyone belonging to that class can get a listing of its contents. If a class of users has read permissions for a file, then anyone belonging to that class can view the file’s contents.
Having “write” permissions for a directory means that anyone belonging to that class can create or remove files (or other directories) inside that directory, while having “write” permissions for a file means that anyone belonging to that class can alter the file’s contents. If a class of users has “execute” permissions for a directory, anyone belonging to that class can move into that directory with the cd (Change Directory) command whereas the “execute” permission for a file means that anyone belonging to that class can run the file as a program.
There is no easy way to give two individuals, or two different groups, explicit permissions for a single file or a single folder. There is no concept of inheritance.
Anyone using NetWare’s NFS Services (introduced with NetWare 3) knows the headaches they went through “mapping” Unix modes to NetWare. No one wants to go through that again. Yet without this rich fabric of attributes and permissions there’s very little reason to move NetWare’s Novell Storage Services (NSS) file system to Linux. Readers have been asking me about this, so I asked Novell. This is the answer I got:
“Novell intends the make available on the Linux platform all the rich services currently available on NetWare. We’ve stated publicly that Novell will be delivering services on an incremental basis to the Linux platform, culminating in the release of NetWare 7. In the NetWare 7 timeframe, we expect customers to be able to run classic NetWare services on either a NetWare kernel or a Linux kernel. You can interpret this to mean that we are investigating the use of Novell Storage Services (NSS) and the accompanying ACL structure on the Linux platform.”
While the message was delivered to me by the press relations folks, it certainly reads like something coming out of marketing – and a committee in marketing at that. Almost 100 words that say, in effect, “we don’t know.”
No one should expect NSS on Linux when NetWare Services for Linux are released later this year. People who expect NSS as part of NetWare 7 on Linux are liable to be disappointed. Of course, given the problems many installations are having with NSS, this could be a blessing in disguise. But that’s a story for another time.
