[RESOLVED] Novell can't be this dead

[goinpostal]

No posts, either Netware is dead or all us Novell guys Know our crap. Maybe this just proves Microsoft is where all the problems are.

Anyone out there I feel soo lonely.

Running Netware 5.1 and 4.11

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--The Internet -- It's not just for porn anymore!!!

[MacGyver]

If I have a Novell problem, I just go to Novell's support site. Solves most of my problems from a local admin's point of view. Our company head tech is a CNA and we have a consultant who is a CNE so I've got lots of support.

Novell probably have the best support site on the web IMHO since they have a good search engine and thousands upon thousands of documents.

This is a good thing, because if you want telephone support from Novell you should be prepared to spend hours on hold. They even have a DJ who plays the hold music like a radio station, and he takes e-mail requests!

Microsoft's support site is pathetic compared to Novell's.

Do you know of any other company that has a support site as good (or better) than Novell's?

Running 4.11 upgrading to 5.whatever soon

[goinpostal]

Good to know I am not alone. I am doing the job of a CNE with out the cert. You are right about support I can't find a thing on technet. They even run online training with the pros on occasion.

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--The Internet -- It's not just for porn anymore!!!

[MacGyver]

If you're lonely, another thing you can try are Novell's online magazines at their website. They currently have five which cover Netware, ZenWorks, NDS, Small Business, and Groupwise.

Check them out at www.novell.com/coolsolutions (http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions)

[Nighthand]

You gotta love a NOS that you can set up on an AST (Yuck!) p166 with 48 meg of RAM and have it run better than NT on an AMD K6/400 with 96Meg of RAM. I always thought Novell was sort of idiot proof. Probably why you don't have a whole lot of questions. That and the fact that not many people are buying anymore.

Running 4.2

[oldman]

well then, you should be able to help me, out here in the hinterlands,
have a customer that moved a computer, set it up and would not boot, reran windows setup runs fine, but will not login to the server, try to run nrtware client to login and it says "tree or server not found", netwrok neighborhood doesn't show the server,

can you tell me where to start then,
these people want local support, i did novell back in the 3.12 days but nothing for years
any help will be welcomed

[goinpostal]

What version of Netware, Client? You should be able to see and login using the microsoft client for netware. make sure you have SPX protocol in network settings and netware as primary logon. if the CPU was moved are you sure the network drop is good and connected to the hub/switch. If the PC can't see anything it may be wiring or NIC.

Please respond if this helps or you have any more questions

[This message has been edited by goinpostal (edited November 03, 2000).]

[pcshark]

Goinpostal, you are not alone. At our shop we have 3 CNE's (including myself), and the majority of our work is NetWare. We have very few customers that are NT or 2000 only, some are hybrid with NetWare doing the bulk of the file/print services, and we have a few that are purely NetWare with Win9x workstations. Me myself, I have a 4.2 server at home with a Win95 workstation (my wife's) and an OS/2 workstation (mine). I just wrote an article for OS/2 eZine about NetWare administration using OS/2 which should be published in this month's issue, due to be released November 16. Part 1 of 3. (www.os2ezine.com)

And the rest of the people here who know me are groaning...NOT MORE OS/2 TALK! LOL

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R. Bret Walker, CNE

Wondering what videos to rent this weekend? Check out The People's Reviews (http://www.geocities.com/pcshark/b-e), movie reviews written for the people and by the people.

[corturbra]

Running NW 4.11 on a single site with Unix and NT. As is usual (I've found anyway) in a mixed platform environment, Unix is happy, Novell is stable and reliable and NT is a migraine waiting (or actually) to happen(ing).

Have worked in a large organization that had 42 offices, each one having a Novell 4.11 and an NT box, with on average 3 sharing a Unix box, and 5 having AS/400. I worked there for 2 years, NT problems were pretty much everyday (proxy server mainly),

Novell probs on average 1 every 2 months (mainly dhcp conflicts, backups and printers),

Unix 2 major problems all the time I was there, with loads of printer probs

AS/400 - 3 calls in 2 years all printer problems, 2 were the printers themselves and the 3rd when someone used the IP address of the printer.

The only major problem we had was a Novell upgrade in a merged tree environment, when the guy installing (after many problems with the hardware) finally got past a certain point and didn't change the default date....

Ended up with a NW5 server 6 months ahead of the 4.11 server, both screaming about time syncs and replicas, took 4 long days to sort it......

I think the funniest moment was when a contractor removed NDS on our live server, thinking it was the test one.... He never lived it down!

As for NT, well if Outlook and Exchange weren't so good I'd pull the plug.....

[pcshark]

Originally posted by corturbra:
As for NT, well if Outlook and Exchange weren't so good I'd pull the plug.....

Didja ever look at GroupWise? Much easier to maintain, integrates seamlessly with NDS, stability, shared document and office collaboration, you name it. The web interface is slick, too. I've seen the web interface for Exchange 5.5 (we're using Exchange 5.5 here, but we support a lot of clients with GroupWise. So much so that I'm three exams now away from my MCNE-Messaging), and I like the GroupWise interface better. Could get rid of your NT woes (nudge nudge wink wink).



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R. Bret Walker, CNE

Wondering what videos to rent this weekend? Check out The People's Reviews (http://www.geocities.com/pcshark/b-e), movie reviews written for the people and by the people.

[corturbra]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by pcshark:
[B] Didja ever look at GroupWise?

Hi, I've not seen Groupwise although I have heard a lot about it. My hands are tied really as users have all there contacts etc set up and you know what losers (sorry I mean users) are like when it comes to change..... plus it's a system thats not long been paid for so the management committee would probably not accept the additional expense to change something which works. (Exchange that is, NT is another matter!)

As you're quite a qualified bod with Novell, mind if I pick your brains?

I have a 4.11 server sp8a with two volumes, SYS and DATA. DATA is filling up rapidly and SYS has 700 MB free, so I'm looking at installing a 10GB HDD, 1 to spend the budget for this year and secondly to allow for Zenworks Applications etc and thirdly to give me plenty of room. How can I incorporate the 10 GB? Can I simply add another volume (Vol 2) and then use server magic to resize the volumes or will I need to re-set the netware partition? Any help would be appreciated.

Also when I use NWAdmin32 on my machine, I can't get into rconsole and it looks like the search drives don't work in DOS, any ideas? I have 3.21 pt4 client loaded.

Thanks
John Turner

[pcshark]

There's a couple ways to go. Simplest, but I certainly hope you have a good tape backup system, is to just add the second hard drive and make it another segment of your DATA volume. Without using ServerMagic, this will extend the size of the volume by the size of the new drive. It works very well, but if you lose one segment of the newly sized volume, you lose the entire volume. Which is why I recommend getting a good tape backup system if you decide to do this, in case you ever need to restore from a crashed hard drive.

The other thing you can do is to add another volume and move the most active data off of the DATA volume onto it. All you'd have to do from an administrative standpoint is to change your drive mappings in the login script and maybe change some pointers on the workstations, but it's not as involved as all that.

Another option is to use ServerMagic to move the DATA volume onto the 10GB drive and let it exist entirely there, and to expand your SYS partition to fill the rest of your original drive. You could also make a third volume where DATA used to be, call it UTILITY, and put all your utility stuff there like OS and client patches, network applications, that sort of thing.

Whatever you do, make sure you begin with a good tape backup. That's just good sense. Good luck (-:

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R. Bret Walker, CNE

Wondering what videos to rent this weekend? Check out The People's Reviews (http://www.geocities.com/pcshark/b-e), movie reviews written for the people and by the people.

[goinpostal]

good advice pc shark the second option is probably the cheapest unless you have access to servermagic. We don't have it and if I remember it is quite expensive. I would go with the second option although it is more work i.e. mappings, login script

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--The Internet -- It's not just for porn anymore!!!

[pcshark]

As for your second issue, which I totally ignored (bad pcshark LOL), you can run Rconsole straight from sys:\public (rconsole.exe), and you can set up a shortcut on your desktop that points to it. For instance, if you F: drive maps to SYS:\, then make a shortcut that points to F:\PUBLIC\RCONSOLE.EXE, then double-click it to start the remote console. The shortcut in NWAdmin32 is kinda hit or miss, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't.

Also, go to a DOS prompt and type MAP to see what search drives you have set up. It's possible your login script is either mis-firing or you don't have SYS:\Public in your search list or some such thing. If typing MAP at a plain DOS prompt (while in you C:\Windows directory or something) does not work or returns a Bad Command or Filename, then SYS:\Public is not mapped properly. Change to your SYS:\Public directory (e.g. F:\Public) and type

MAP INS S1:=SYS:\PUBLIC

That'll fix what ails ya.


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R. Bret Walker, CNE

Wondering what videos to rent this weekend? Check out The People's Reviews (http://www.geocities.com/pcshark/b-e), movie reviews written for the people and by the people.

"Now that's a damn shame, folks be throwin' away a perfectly good white boy like that!"

[tregee]

Pcshark's first suggestion is one I would recommend doing. For one there is no administration overhead, just add the drive space to the current volume and your done. I am assuming that you do have a good backup system right? The second solution requires right assignments to the new volume, and for some this is an area that is better left alone. What ever you decide to do they are both good suggestions. You the (politically correct answer) person Pcshark. Kudos

[pcshark]

Originally posted by tregee:
You the (politically correct answer) person Pcshark. Kudos

They call me Mr. Tibbs!

LOL, thanks for the kind words (-:

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R. Bret Walker, CNE

Wondering what videos to rent this weekend? Check out The People's Reviews (http://www.geocities.com/pcshark/b-e), movie reviews written for the people and by the people.

"What the hell's the matter with you? You could have killed him!"
"So what if I did?"
"I don't know, it seems a little harsh..."

[corturbra]

Hi there

Thanks for your replies, I think I'll probably run with option 3 as I want somewhere I can run apps from including ZenWorks and Virus guard. Talking of virus software, McAfee is currently running on the network, but not for long..... Log files say "yes we have been downloading updates weekly since Jan 2000" I checked a few PC's today and guess what? Its downloaded the Dat files ok, but placed them in the wrong directory....

Then I try to install SP1 for v 4.0.3 and I get a message "you need version 4.0.3 to run this service pack" and it closes. Then the best bit of all, following instructions off the nai.com site I create a file called EICAR.COM with content specified by nai (its a file that pretends its a virus!) to test its product, and you've probably already guessed, it didn't pick it up....

Sorry a bit off the Novell track, but it did amuse me!

[pcshark]

We use and resell Norton AntiVirus. Corporate Edition 7.5 just came out. What you do is install it to the server, then install the clients from the server. After that, when the updates are applied to the server the clients automatically pull down the updates. Very nice, very low maintenance, and NAV picks up everything I've seen thrown at it.

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R. Bret Walker, CNE

Wondering what videos to rent this weekend? Check out The People's Reviews (http://www.geocities.com/pcshark/b-e), movie reviews written for the people and by the people.

"What the hell's the matter with you? You could have killed him!"
"So what if I did?"
"I don't know, it seems a little harsh..."