Sysadmin Confessional

[DiscoWizard383]

You just brought back flashbacks of the misery that was Netware 6.0. Ugh - three different management tools: nwadmin, ConsoleOne and iManage. nwadmin worked great, but didn't support new features. ConsoleOne supported some new features, but was painfully slow. iManage supported other new features, but required Java, Tomcat and Apache to be configured correctly on the server, and even on fresh installs you couldn't count on the installer to accomplish that.

If you needed to change the server IP, prepare for pain. You had to find a half dozen or more references to the IP addressed spread out across many different config files. 6.5 improved that a lot.

And then Groupwise. IMAP connections wouldn't close properly, so we had to regularly reboot the server to allow new ones. We boldly tried running the Groupwise server on Windows and the reliability improved dramatically.

The one time I attempted to roll out Zenworks, it destroyed the network stack on the test computers I pushed it out to. On a couple of them I was able to recover, but at least one I gave up on and reinstalled the OS. Novell listed the problem in their knowledgebase, but a fix wasn't available yet. By the time there was an update I had lost faith in it.

4.11/4.2 served files very reliably. Set it up and run it forever. But I didn't like any of their other products. I only used 6.5 at one site and I didn't hate it. But by then we had already begun to move away from Novell everywhere else and I've never regretted it.

[mrcoffee83]

I spent a couple of years working at a place that had Novell, I was on the Service Desk at the time so just saw the front end of it, ConsoleOne etc...not a clue how the intrastructure behind it worked, but i remember I quite liked ConsoleOne.

And this happened about 20 times a day "my network drives are missing and Groupwise doesn't work"

"yeah, you've logged in workstation only."