[comp.sys.novell] NFS Suppoart in NetWare

jmatrow@ncrwic.Wichita.NCR.COM (John Matrow) (02/14/91)

From the Novell Mailling List:

From:         Janet Perry <janetp%NOVELL.COM@uga.cc.uga.edu>

NOVELL INTRODUCES NETWARE NFS

Transparent NetWare Integration for UNIX Systems

BOSTON, Mass., NETWORLD -- February 11, 1991 -- Novell,
Inc., developer of NetWare systems software products, today
introduced NetWare NFS, a new service for the NetWare v3.11
network operating system that gives UNIX users transparent
integration with NetWare file systems and resources.

NetWare NFS, Novell's implementation of Sun Microsystems'
Network File System standard, is a set of NetWare Loadable
Modules (NLMs) that allows NetWare v3.11 to provide native
file and print services for UNIX clients.  It also lets
clients share NetWare files and resources with DOS,
Macintosh, OS/2 and Windows clients.  NetWare NFS requires
no additional client software and runs as a service on the
TCP/IP protocol stack provided in the NetWare v3.11 server.

"Desktop capabilities are evolving, and many users are
opting for the performance and functionality of today's
UNIX workstations.  As a result, network managers need a
networking architecture that supports freedom of choice
among desktop systems," said Bob Davis, director of product
marketing at Novell's San Jose development center.  "Only
NetWare is capable of supporting all popular desktop
computing environments and integrating them into an
efficient information system while preserving their native
interfaces.  Now, with NetWare NFS, UNIX users join DOS,
Windows, OS/2 and Macintosh users as peers within the
NetWare environment."

NetWare NFS provides the following services:

-o-  Transparent integration of UNIX workstations into the
NetWare environment -- UNIX users access NetWare services
through their familiar command set, while other NetWare
clients view UNIX files from the perspective of their
native file systems.  UNIX clients attach to NetWare
servers via the UNIX "mount" command, view the NetWare file
system as an extension of the distributed UNIX file
systems, access NetWare print queues through the UNIX "lpr"
command and transfer files to and from the server via FTP
(File Transfer Protocol).

-o-  Integration of UNIX host systems with NetWare
workgroups -- By linking large, multi-user UNIX systems to
NetWare via NetWare NFS, network managers can create paths
that allow UNIX users to access NetWare files and
resources, providing a cost-effective connectivity solution
between UNIX host systems and the NetWare environment.

-o-  High-performance NFS file server functionality -- By
using NetWare NFS as a UNIX workgroup file server, users
benefit from traditional NetWare strengths such as fault
tolerance, security and resource management.  NetWare NFS,
running on standard platforms, provides a cost-effective
means to bring high-end NFS server performance and
functionality to UNIX users.

PRICING AND AVAILABILITY

In the United States and Canada, NetWare NFS lists for U.S.
$4995 and will be available in April 1991 from all Novell
Platinum resellers and qualified Novell Gold resellers.
Customers currently using the Education Account Purchase
Program for NetWare will be able to buy a site license version
of this product.

For more information:

Janet Perry
Novell, Inc.
415-975-4480
janetp@ca.novell.com

-- 
John Matrow   6091 Engineering, NCR Peripheral Products Division
 NCR:654-8851 <J.Matrow@Wichita.NCR.COM>
(316)636-8851 <uunet!ncrlnk!ncrwic!j.matrow>
 FAX:636-8889 "I fought the LAN and the...  LAN won."

dwd@usenet.umr.edu (Dan DeNise) (02/18/91)

>From:         Janet Perry <janetp%NOVELL.COM@uga.cc.uga.edu>

[text deleted]

>NetWare NFS provides the following services:
>
>-o-  Transparent integration of UNIX workstations into the
>NetWare environment -- UNIX users access NetWare services
>through their familiar command set, while other NetWare
>clients view UNIX files from the perspective of their
>native file systems.  UNIX clients attach to NetWare
>servers via the UNIX "mount" command, view the NetWare file
>system as an extension of the distributed UNIX file
>systems, access NetWare print queues through the UNIX "lpr"
>command and transfer files to and from the server via FTP
>(File Transfer Protocol).

[text deleted]

>Janet Perry
>Novell, Inc.
>415-975-4480
>janetp@ca.novell.com

This handles unix hosts accessing novell services.  What about novell
clients accessing unix services?  Any facilities for a novell server
mounting NFS volumes and providing access to them for it's DOS, Mac,
and OS/2 clients?  How about sending jobs from a Novell print queue to
an lpd daemon on the Unix side?  Is this a one or two way gateway?

Dan DeNise                              c0016@umrvmb.umr.edu
Computing Services                      (314)341-4841
University of Missouri-Rolla            114 Math/Computer Science
Missouri's Technological University     Rolla, Missouri, 65401

9531sons@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu (Jamie Sonsini) (02/19/91)

Thanks for posting this entry. We are just in the process of moving a
Netware 386 server (token ring attached ) into the same location as two
Sun systems (3/50 & 3/280) which are on a local ethernet LAN.  The
Netware system is new and has no tape backup (yet) and I was thinking
that it would sure be handy if we could use the Exabyte tape drive
which is attached to our Sun 3/50. Just put an ethernet card into the
Netware server.

From reading this posting, it looks like NFS support would let us use
the Unix backup (dump and restore) programs to backup our Netware
server.  Does this make sense? Anyone tried this?  Are there alternate
ways we could do this without buying NFS support?

Thanks,
   
				Jamie Sonsini
				UC Santa Barbara
				9531sons@ucsbvm.bitnet

brian@la.excelan.com (Brian Meek) (02/20/91)

The News Manager)
Nntp-Posting-Host: la
Reply-To: brian@la.novell.com (Brian Meek)
Organization: Novell, Inc., San Jose, Califonia
References: <6434@ncrwic.Wichita.NCR.COM> <9204@hub.ucsb.edu>
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 1991 18:13:41 GMT

In article <9204@hub.ucsb.edu> 9531sons@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu (Jamie Sonsini) writes:
>
>Thanks for posting this entry. We are just in the process of moving a
>Netware 386 server (token ring attached ) into the same location as two
>Sun systems (3/50 & 3/280) which are on a local ethernet LAN.  The
>Netware system is new and has no tape backup (yet) and I was thinking
>that it would sure be handy if we could use the Exabyte tape drive
>which is attached to our Sun 3/50. Just put an ethernet card into the
>Netware server.
>
>From reading this posting, it looks like NFS support would let us use
>the Unix backup (dump and restore) programs to backup our Netware
>server.  Does this make sense? Anyone tried this?  Are there alternate
>ways we could do this without buying NFS support?
>
Sure, it will work... but not the way I think you want it to.  Unix
dump of the NetWare filesystem to a Unix tape will only get the 
files themselves and the _Unix_ file attributes.  Mac, DOS and OS/2
namespace, nor the NetWare bindery information would not get backed up.

Sounds like an opportunity for vendors of Unix based backup systems :-).

brian
____________________________________________________________________________
         Brian Meek       Novell, Inc. - 2180 Fortune Dr. San Jose, CA 95131
Internet Mail: brian@novell.COM                        Phone: (408) 473-8375

brian@la.excelan.com (Brian Meek) (02/20/91)

The News Manager)
Nntp-Posting-Host: la
Reply-To: brian@la.excelan.com (Brian Meek)
Organization: Excelan, Inc., San Jose, Califonia
References: <6434@ncrwic.Wichita.NCR.COM> <2188@umriscc.isc.umr.edu>
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 1991 17:57:48 GMT

In article <2188@umriscc.isc.umr.edu> comp.sys.novell writes:
>>From:         Janet Perry <janetp%NOVELL.COM@uga.cc.uga.edu>
>
>[text deleted]
>
>>NetWare NFS provides the following services:
>>
>>-o-  Transparent integration of UNIX workstations into the
>>NetWare environment -- UNIX users access NetWare services
>>through their familiar command set, while other NetWare
>>clients view UNIX files from the perspective of their
>>native file systems.  UNIX clients attach to NetWare
>>servers via the UNIX "mount" command, view the NetWare file
>>system as an extension of the distributed UNIX file
>>systems, access NetWare print queues through the UNIX "lpr"
>>command and transfer files to and from the server via FTP
>>(File Transfer Protocol).
>
>[text deleted]
>
>This handles unix hosts accessing novell services.  What about novell
>clients accessing unix services?  Any facilities for a novell server
>mounting NFS volumes and providing access to them for it's DOS, Mac,
>and OS/2 clients?  How about sending jobs from a Novell print queue to
>an lpd daemon on the Unix side?  Is this a one or two way gateway?
>
>Dan DeNise                              c0016@umrvmb.umr.edu
>
NetWare NFS was not designed to provide access to remotely mounted
NFS volumes for NetWare clients.  NetWare NFS was targeted at the
Unix users who want high performance access to shared NetWare resources.

I should point out that Portable NetWare provides the feature you are 
looking for.  One Unix machine, with multiple remote NFS volumes mounted,
can load up Portable NetWare and offer that distributed Unix file system
as one big NetWare volume to any NetWare client.

Portable NetWare is an integration product.  So is NetWare NFS, but NetWare
NFS is really a targeted solution for Unix clients to NetWare servers.

brian
____________________________________________________________________________
         Brian Meek       Novell, Inc. - 2180 Fortune Dr. San Jose, CA 95131
Internet Mail: brian@novell.COM                        Phone: (408) 473-8375

brian@cimage.com (Brian Kelley) (02/21/91)

In article <6434@ncrwic.Wichita.NCR.COM> jmatrow@ncrwic.Wichita.NCR.COM (John Matrow) writes:
>From the Novell Mailling List:
>
>NOVELL INTRODUCES NETWARE NFS
>
>"Desktop capabilities are evolving, and many users are
>opting for the performance and functionality of today's
>UNIX workstations.  As a result, network managers need a
>networking architecture that supports freedom of choice
>among desktop systems," said Bob Davis, director of product
>marketing at Novell's San Jose development center.  "Only
>NetWare is capable of supporting all popular desktop
>computing environments and integrating them into an
>efficient information system while preserving their native
>interfaces.  Now, with NetWare NFS, UNIX users join DOS,
>Windows, OS/2 and Macintosh users as peers within the
>NetWare environment."

If they can afford it.  If they can't, I guess they'll move everything to
their UNIX hosts and dump Novell?


>In the United States and Canada, NetWare NFS lists for U.S.
>$4995 and will be available in April 1991 from all Novell
>Platinum resellers and qualified Novell Gold resellers.
>Customers currently using the Education Account Purchase
>Program for NetWare will be able to buy a site license version
>of this product.

Would someone at Novell care to explain why this product costs $5000?
That's a lot of money for what is basically a a big TSR (which also happens
to be version 1.00000).  The big initial hype of 3.0 was increased 
connectivity and TCP/IP support.  I think most of us thought that the $8K
price tag paid for that.  I guess I was quite wrong.

While the pricing for new copies of Netware 3.11 have been posted, I have
not seen any prices for upgrades.  How much will 3.1 -> 3.11 upgrades be
if you've already used your 1 free upgrade (from 3.0 to 3.1)?  From what 
I understand, buyers of 3.0 who registered were promised the Mac NLM when
it became available.  Because the Mac NLM requires 3.11, I've been told that
3.11 will thrown in for free (and you choose how many users you require).

keith@ca.excelan.com (Keith Brown) (02/22/91)

The News Manager)
Nntp-Posting-Host: ca
Reply-To: keith@ca.excelan.com (Keith Brown)
Organization: Novell, Inc., San Jose, Califonia
References: <6434@ncrwic.Wichita.NCR.COM> <1991Feb21.144302.18780@cimage.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 1991 23:49:00 GMT

In article <1991Feb21.144302.18780@cimage.com> brian@dgsi.UUCP (Brian Kelley) writes:
>
>Would someone at Novell care to explain why this product costs $5000?
>That's a lot of money for what is basically a a big TSR (which also happens
>to be version 1.00000).

Sure. I'll have to have a go at this without sounding too commercial
though! Before I start, our first release of NetWare NFS is v1.1, NOT 1.00000.

Anyway.....
The NetWare NFS product that we've been developing here over
the last couple of years or so is, in my personal words (not Novells),
a screamer! When the pricing was done, we compared the product against 
UNIX based NFS servers. I'm an old UNIX hack myself, and still a big fan
of UNIX in fact, however, clearly the UNIX OS design is geared toward
making it a great interactive operating system, not a great file server.

Unlike UNIX, the NetWare operating system design is highly optimised
for providing "back end" transactional type network services to client
systems. NetWare doesn't carry with it all the additional baggage that
makes UNIX such a great interactive OS. NetWare does no swapping and
paging to disk, it does not have to set up and tear down virtual
machine environments for service processes, no unnecessary internal
buffer copies are required to copy data between user and kernel space
(Everything is kernel space in in NetWare OSs, consequently NetWare NFS
transmits data directly from the disk cache to the network on client
reads and shifts data directly from LSL (network) buffers to the disk
cache on writes). Of particular importance to NFS is the speed at which
NetWare can switch context between threads.  NetWare achieves context
switches in just a few microseconds. Put simply a NetWare context
switch is nothing more than a save of processor registers, a chase down
a data structure to find the next runable thread, and a reload of
registers. Transactional protocols requiring disk IO, like NFS, generally
mean lots of context switches have to take place at the server.

What all this really adds up to is that, when judged as an NFS server
alongside UNIX servers, NetWare NFS gives you a great deal more bang
for the buck! Use the product on a cheap 386SX server platform and you've
just purchased yourself the cheapest NFS server you'll find. Use the
product on something a little more meaty, such as a SystemPro, a NetFrame
or a Tricord and you have yourself an NFS server capable of pounding
through in excess of 400 NFS operations a second.

To add to this, all of NetWare v3.11s fault tolerent capabilities (disk
mirroring, duplexing, UPS support, read after write verify etc...) are
applicable to NetWare NFS (we inherited them from the OS for free :-).
You'd have to part with some serious money to get these in a UNIX based
NFS server platform, if you could find them at all.

Aside from all of this, the files that are accesible to UNIX systems via
NetWare NFS are also transparently accessible to DOS systems (free with
the OS), Macintosh systems (bit more money) and OS/2 systems (tiny bit
more money) concurrently. When was the last time you saw a UNIX system
that could manage all of this straight out of the box?

>  The big initial hype of 3.0 was increased 
>connectivity and TCP/IP support.  I think most of us thought that the $8K
>price tag paid for that.  I guess I was quite wrong.

The entry price of NetWare v3.11 is now $3,495 (20 user). Updates and upgrades
are even cheaper than this, but to answer your specific questions....

>
>While the pricing for new copies of Netware 3.11 have been posted, I have
>not seen any prices for upgrades.  How much will 3.1 -> 3.11 upgrades be
>if you've already used your 1 free upgrade (from 3.0 to 3.1)?

If you buy any of the additional NLM sets (NetWare NFS, NetWare for Mac 3.0,
NetWare FTAM or NetWare Communication Services) the upgrade from 3.1->3.11
is free. If you don't, the price depends upon your existing update/upgrade
agreements with your reseller or us.

>  From what 
>I understand, buyers of 3.0 who registered were promised the Mac NLM when
>it became available.  Because the Mac NLM requires 3.11, I've been told that
>3.11 will thrown in for free (and you choose how many users you require).

And our promises are good. If you bought and registered NetWare 386
v3.0, NetWare for Mac v3.0 will be sent to you automatically and at no
charge, complete with a NetWare v3.11 to run it on. NetWare 386 3.1
customers (who never owned 3.0) were never made this promise but if
they purchase NetWare for Mac v3.0, they also get their OS upgrade for
free.

Keith

-
Keith Brown                                      Phone: (408) 473 8308
Novell San Jose Development Centre               Fax:   (408) 433 0775
2180 Fortune Dr, San Jose, California 95131      Net:   keith@novell.COM

wittmann@erb1.engr.wisc.edu (art wittmann) (02/25/91)

In article <1991Feb23.115926.14506@robobar.co.uk> ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) writes:
>keith@ca.excelan.com (Keith Brown) writes:
>
>> The entry price of NetWare v3.11 is now $3,495 (20 user).
>
>How do you count users coming in over NFS ?  Or is that 20 NetWare users
>plus as many NFS ones as I like ?
>
>-- 
>Ronald Khoo <ronald@robobar.co.uk> +44 81 991 1142 (O) +44 71 229 7741 (H)


Very clever of you!!!! Indeed, you are limited to 20 DOS users but you
can have all the NFS users you can throw at the server.

If the NFS server turns out to be as great as claimed, buying the 20 user
version would be the way to decrease the price as much as possible.

Art

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Art Wittmann                                  Phone: (608) 263-1748
Network Manager                               Email: wittmann@engr.wisc.edu
Computer Aided Engineering Center                or: wittmann@cae.wisc.edu
University of Wisconsin, Madison

rbraun@spdcc.COM (Rich Braun) (02/25/91)

brian@dgsi.UUCP (Brian Kelley) writes:
>Would someone at Novell care to explain why this product costs $5000?
>That's a lot of money for what is basically a a big TSR (which also happens
>to be version 1.00000).  The big initial hype of 3.0 was increased 
>connectivity and TCP/IP support.

And to Novell, I offer the following challenge:

Please drop your price on this product.  NFS is a _public domain_
protocol put out by Sun Microsystems.  Sources are available both from
me (in the form of SOS) and from uunet.uu.net.  SOS has been modified,
relatively easily within 2-1/2 weeks of my time, to support many Novell
file authentication features.  It doesn't offer the level of performance
which an NFS TSR running directly on the server offers, but it's my bet
that someone can accomplish this for a whole lot less than five grand.

So, Novell, whadya say?  How about charging the $500 which, say,
Santa Cruz Operation is charging?  Or even, shudder, the $0 which Sun
charges (i.e., throw it in with your TCP/IP product)?

-rich

keith@ca.excelan.com (Keith Brown) (03/06/91)

The News Manager)
Nntp-Posting-Host: ca
Reply-To: keith@ca.excelan.com (Keith Brown)
Organization: Novell, Inc. San Jose, California
References: <1991Feb21.234900.11916@novell.com> <1991Feb23.115926.14506@robobar.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 1991 17:27:25 GMT

In article <1991Feb23.115926.14506@robobar.co.uk> ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) writes:
>keith@ca.excelan.com (Keith Brown) writes:
>
>> The entry price of NetWare v3.11 is now $3,495 (20 user).
>
>How do you count users coming in over NFS ?  Or is that 20 NetWare users
>plus as many NFS ones as I like ?
>

Precisely. NetWare NFS can run on any of the three versions of NetWare
v3.11 (20, 100 or 250 user) with no arbitrary limitations on number of
NFS users or number of NFS clients. As far as NetWare is concerned,
NetWare NFS takes up *no* user connection slots. NetWare for Mac does
though.  For example, if you have a 100 user v3.11 server and a 20 user
copy of NetWare for Mac, it means that 20 of the 100 users can be Mac
clients (you don't get 120 users out of it!).

Keith
-
Keith Brown                                      Phone: (408) 473 8308
Novell San Jose Development Centre               Fax:   (408) 433 0775
2180 Fortune Dr, San Jose, California 95131      Net:   keith@novell.COM