Southern Bread

Goodbye NetWare. It was a fun ride. In the end I tried to hold on too long. But now it’s time to let you go. I remember all the times I spent staring at your Blue/Turquoise/Yellow monitor interface. All the sleepless nights staring anxiously at the volrepair screen. No software gave more tonnage of useless system information to a sysadmin than you. I’m not sure why anyone would need to know what the new serviceprocess wait time was, but by gosh if we did you would tell us. You were a straightforward Operating System. You never had to guess what the command “memory” would do. You would get a little wordy on us at times though with commands such as “ADD NAMESPACE LONG TO VOLUME SYS”, but that was part of your mystique. Do you remember back in the early ’90’s when you tried to go all Unix on us and give us FTP and NFS and such. Those were the days. You had the wierdest version of ping I’d ever seen, but who cares when you’ve got IPX right?

Ahhhh…IPX. What a protocol! When the rest of the world wanted to jump on the TCP bandwagon, you resisted. Who needs to give an interface another address when it’s already got a MAC address that will do just fine? Take your ARP and shove it you told us. But just when we thought you were at your strongest, the demise started: Client32. What had been a feat of dos programming turned into a kludge of windows workarounds. The addage, “There’s no problem that uninstalling Client32 won’t fix” should have alerted us that something was wrong. Yes, the client eventually got better, but just when we thought you were safe, along came Active Directory. In classic Microsoft fashion, they beat you at your own game. The one feature that set you apart was snatched from you in the night. What was your answer to that? Your grand counter-attack? Console-One, NSS and a lame GUI on the server.

I don’t have enough storage space on my hosting account to record all that was wrong with Console-One. In tandem with NSS they became the next-generation weapon that you would battle Microsoft with. Except you forgot one thing: people actually expected to be able to use them. Console-One was for so long just a glorified LDAP browser, and NSS actually warned us not to use it when we tried. Again, we should have known you were on life-support. I knew the battle was over the first time I fired you up and saw that nasty x-windows GUI. About the only thing it was good for was robbing you of about 30 megs of memory. No web browser. Only Console-One would work. A nasty, nasty file browser. A GUI version of nwconfig that only a mother could love. In the end, it was just too much next-gen software that wouldn’t get the job done.

So, goodbye NetWare. I hear you have a nice, new Linux kernel these days and they are calling you Suse. I wish you all the best. As for me, I’ll be using your distant cousin Fedora for a while, and warming myself by the fire I made with that stack of old CNE and CNA certificates. It was fun while it lasted.