COMMENT - Novell cramps NetWare 5's style by casting it in a Java-based mould.

I've finally got to spend a few days with NetWare 5, and it's been fascinating, especially comparing it to NT Server and BackOffice. It improves on NetWare 4.11 in many ways, from a wonderfully simple installation (answer a few questions up front then leave the software to it). It manages to fix possibly the major limitation of all earlier versions, by supporting arbitrarily large disk volumes in modest amounts of RAM. TCP/IP support is excellent; it acts as a server for DNS, DHCP and HTTP; and it hardly matters if clients use it or IPX to connect with the server.

However, Novell considers Java support is more important than such things, and it has chosen to show this off with a Java GUI for NetWare, ConsoleOne.

This runs in a web browser on a client, but to run it on NetWare itself, Novell has bundled an X server running what appears to be the Motif window manager. The result was horribly slow and unresponsive on my test server - a P166 with 64Mb of RAM. I've run NT4 in 16Mb of RAM on a 486 and it looked better than this.

Falling short of today's standards

NetWare 5 isn't slow - far from it. As a server, it's fast and responsive, as was ConsoleOne running under Windows 95 on a client machine of identical specification. Furthermore, running the X server didn't appear to slow NetWare's other operations down in any way. Although it likes lots of RAM, NetWare is famously frugal with machine resources, and modest networks of up to a few dozen clients can be adequately served from a 486. By today's standards, a 64Mb P166 isn't a powerhouse, but seeing one crawl is worrying, especially when Windows 'feels' so much faster on such a machine. No wonder the minimum recommended specification is a 64Mb Pentium-100.

On balance, it must be remarked that NetWare administration is typically carried out from a client machine - the standard tool is the NetWare Administrator for Windows, NWAdmin. Unfortunately, this powerful but daunting program hasn't changed substantially from NetWare 4; instead, Novell has replicated it in Java to create ConsoleOne.

Although NetWare 5's NDS database, for example, holds more information than ever, including DHCP and DNS settings, both NWAdmin and ConsoleOne only offer a simple tree view. The addition of explanatory text labels would be a huge help.

Configuring some subsystems, such as the DNS and DHCP servers, uses Java applets. While that's fine in principle, integration suffers. You can view the settings in NWAdmin or ConsoleOne, but must run separate tools to change them. To actually start or stop the servers, you have to go to the NetWare command line. Other sub-programs such as ZENworks require multiple separate steps in both NWAdmin and ConsoleOne; there are no helpful 'wizards' to link the stages.

The limitations of platform-independent administration

I doubt there is a single right way. While I can sympathise with a desire to reduce NetWare's dependence on Windows clients for administration, that's what most NetWare 5 servers will be supporting and most administrators using. However, instead of improving the existing setup and administration tools, Novell has wasted its efforts re-implementing them in Java. Platform-independent administration sounds good, but in practice, the result has been to put an embarrassingly slow and clumsy GUI on the server.

Surface polish matters. For example, OS/2 dialog boxes lack OK and Apply buttons; changes happen as soon as you set the value; and you leave by clicking the 'X' at top right. Microsoft traded this logical elegance for simplicity and intuitive accessibility.

NetWare 5 is a very powerful and flexible server, TCP/IP support is superb, but configuring it is awkward and arcane. ZENworks is a far better client administration tool than anything that comes with NT, but it's quite complex to get running.

NT4 is easier, and Windows 2000 promises to match the features, if not the performance or stability, of NetWare 5. Ease and speed of use are paramount for harried network managers, and it's here that NT still has a sharp edge on NetWare 5.

Liam Proven