[olug] OT Novell Linux gamble paying off.

[Bill Brush]

Well I'll give some really brief explanations of some of the products I
saw.  If someone wants more detail, just ask.

iFolder - A file synchronization system.  You save files to your "iFolder"
on your local machine and a client applet uploads the files to the iFolder
server.  Any other machines that are logged or log on after that
automatically get the new file downloaded.  Any changes that are made to a
file are sync'ed also (just the changes are sent over the wire).  I use
this every day and it is great.  I can save my files on any of the machines
I work on and it just magically keeps them all the same.  I even have a
beta copy of the Linux client and have had files syncing between 4
different machines.

iPrint - An IPP printing system.  The nice thing about this system is that
it has facilities for creating printing maps of your office and your users
can simply locate the printer icon for their printer and click on it, and
then the printer is automatically installed.  With Windows the driver is
auto-installed also.  I saw the Linux client portion working at Brainshare.

Netstorage - Web access for the file system.  Allows you to access your
file shares from a web browser over an https connection.

Novell Linux desktop - Not Ximian, not Suse KDE this was a complete desktop
environment which from what I understand Novell will be using it internally
as they convert to a Linux desktop.

Novell services for Linux (NNLS) - Basically the file share infrastructure
from Netware but running as a service on a Linux box instead of on the
Netware kernel.  This is the the direction Novell is heading with their
development.  IMO this gives them an easy step to go to 64 bits.

Novell cluster services (NCS) on Linux - Novell's high-availability
clustering technology, but it now works in conjunction with NNLS.  The cool
thing is that once they get this perfected you'll be able to mix Netware
and Linux nodes in the same cluster and the resources will migrate between
nodes without worrying about the underlying OS.   Tied to this is the
Business Continuity Cluster which was developed on Netware but will work
with NCS and NNLS.  What a BCC implementation will do is mirror data and
directory information between two separate clusters.  If one cluster goes
offline the other cluster will take over it's job seamlessly.  They demo'ed
this last year and it was IMPRESSIVE.  The cluster architect that I talked
to told me that the BCC is almost ready for prime time.  Later this year
they'll have this available through their consulting services or if you're
feeling saucy you can try to roll your own.

There's a lot more services that are available with all this, but I don't
think I want to write up a fully exhaustive list.

Bill

olug-bounces at olug.org wrote on 04/21/2004 06:47:04 PM:

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Bill Brush" <bbrush at unlnotes.unl.edu>
> To: <dan at linder.org>; "Omaha Linux User Group" <olug at olug.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 3:44 PM
> Subject: Re: [olug] OT Novell Linux gamble paying off.
> [..snip..]
> > I don't actually see this being that hard for them.  Anyone who hasn't
> done
> > it should browse around forge.novell.com.  Novell has a lot of OSS
> projects
> > there, plus they contribute to several others.  Last month they
> > open-sourced their iFolder product and that piece of software is
nothing
> > short of awesome.  IIRC a good chunk of the LDAP code out there was
> > contributed by Novell.  I think the one area they don't contribute is
> > kernel development, but I could be wrong on that.
> >
> Can you talk more about iFolder and what cool things you saw?  It sounds
> like a portion of the chandler http://www.osafoundation.org/ .  Ability
to
> share documents among users and operating systems in particular.
>
> -Jeff
>
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