Just a quick (perhaps slightly OT) note to tell everyone that I'm currently in Provo, Utah, at Novell's ATT Live 4-day training event (see http://www.novell.com/training/attlive/ for details). Some quick thoughts to share:
* Naturally, I've been talking up eCS and the consulting which
Rosenthal & Rosenthal does on eCS and NetWare. In general, I've
gotten quite a bit of interested feedback, some from people who
used to use OS/2, and several (of course) who were surprised that
anyone still did use OS/2. Yesterday and today, at breakfast and
lunch, I took my ThinkPad out (many others are checking their
mail, etc.), and fired up with my big, OS/2 Warp 4 boot bitmap...
Considering the other standard system sounds I've been hearing
around me from the XP notebooks and even the SuSE notebooks (yes,
many folks here are running SuSE on their notebooks), mine does
seem to cause some heads to turn with the Enterprise computer's
voice (Majel Barrett Roddenberry) saying, "Working...desktop
complete." ;-)
* I had a great (though brief) conversation with Laura Chappell
today (http://www.packet-level.com/), who is arguably one of the
world's foremost packet analysts. When I asked her if she had an
opportunity recently to work on OS/2, she smiled, and recalled to
me her days at Microsoft with OS/2 1.0, and how they had so much
trouble teaching on it, as it was still in its infancy. Anyway,
she was most interested to hear about our (Rosenthal &
Rosenthal's) efforts to develop an IPSec client for BorderManager
VPNs, and asked if I would drop her a line to keep her posted on
our progress. This should make some good press, if she blogs about
it and mentions it at her other classes. (Laura was excellent,
BTW; I recommend that everyone try to sit in on one of her
sessions sometime; she travels the globe, so there's no excuse not
to!)
* On the depressing side, as we've all heard in the press, and
gleaned from the distinct lack of supporting statements from
Novell, I can say without much doubt that NetWare - as we know it
- will be vanishing in the next few years. Sometime after Cypress
ships (the next version of Open Enterprise Server), Novell will be
rolling out NetWare viX. viX will be a specially optimized version
of NetWare to run in a virtual session on the Linux kernel,
allowing "legacy" NetWare NLMs to run in such an environment until
such time as these applications can be migrated to OES Linux
natively. There will be IA-64 support for the Linux kernel, but as
of now, Novell has no plans to support NetWare running natively on
64-bit hardware (all of this sounds eerily familiar to most of us
on this list...only the company's color ten years ago was blue
instead of red - and green, now). While Novell has made a ten-year
commitment to support and update other venerable products like
GroupWise, they refuse to make a similar statement regarding
NetWare, and believe me, many of us have buzzed about it.
What does this mean for us? Well, on the OS/2 side, it's almost easier to connect to a Linux box these days than a NetWare box (assuming there's no IPX on the wire), and IP-printing - while not on par with iPrint - does indeed work. In fact, part of the plan for an IP-aware NetWare client for OS/2 involves authenticating via LDAP and mapping drives via Samba, anyway, and this would be in line with where Novell is taking us (whether we like it or not - we all agree that nothing seems to be faster than good old NCP, however).
On the VPN side, our development efforts continue, and will not be wasted. I had a class this morning on Novell Security Manager (http://www.novell.com/products/securitymanager/), which is their branded version of Astaro's firewall, proxy, and IPSec VPN for Linux. This is a nice product, and I was so impressed, that I will be deploying two of these boxes for myself in the coming weeks. (Essentially, Security Manager ships as a single CD - or iso - which is loaded onto a box, erasing all data on the local drive(s) and laying down SuSE Linux. It then creates a single-purpose box, which is easily administered via a browser on a machine inside the LAN.) As Security Manager uses standard IPSec for its VPN, our soon-to-be-developed (hopefully) VPN client should work just fine with it. Also, don't forget that BorderManager 3.9 is in development right now, and should be released in beta 1Q or 2Q 2006, IIRC.
If anyone has any specific questions regarding sessions or if you'd like me to speak to anyone while I'm here, please post back. I'm here tomorrow and Friday, as well, and I wrap up with a FREE CLP practicum Friday afternoon (and, no, I don't feel like I'm ready for it, but it's FREE!).
--
Lewis
------------------------------------------------------------
Lewis G Rosenthal, CNA, CLE
Rosenthal & Rosenthal, LLC
Accountants / Network Consultants
New York / Northern Virginia www.2rosenthals.com
eComStation Consultants www.ecomstation.com
Novell Users International www.novell.com/linux/truth
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