by carl malamud novell'sgateway tonowherecro ing a ub network boundary ar limited to 576 byte....
Post on 27-Mar-2021
0 Views
Preview:
TRANSCRIPT
L \\ \'IE\\ S
By Carl Malamud
Novell's GatewaytoNowhere
etWare/386. ovell an-nounced this product with much fanfare and went togreat pain to pointout a !'performance-enhancement" featurelack of memoryprotection.
Memory protection mean thatone program can't
write over a region of memory used byanother. When it' mi ing, it's po iblefor a random utility to write over the operating y tern kernel' regi ter in memory. 0 problem, according to ovell.Programs hould undergo rigorou te ting before being allowed to run or houldrun on dedicated erver .
I don't know about your network,but I can't afford to dedicate eparateervers to every piece of software com
ing out. or would I want to: I want myu er buying, in talling, and te ting oftware them elve .
By the way, the lack of memory pro-
It' a question of ophistication:When it comes to me aging, record-level file earche, true di tributed locking,and a ho t of other ervice, ovelldoe n't perform nearly as well.
E entially, the ba ic core ovelloftware works fine for imple data ac
ce in mall network . More than half ofall ovell installation are aid to b eightnodes or Ie . Granted, a few ites u e
ovell in large internetwork . But manydo 0 becau e they locked them elve inearly on.
Be ides poor support, hyperactivepublici t , and bug, ovell al 0 faceorne fundamental de ign problem that
were avoided in more mature networkand operating sy terns uch as VAXlVMwith DECnet or TCP/IP with BerkeleyUnix.
Take
Ugly oftwar ju tdoe n't appeal to me.
I can program in dBa.. orCOBOL, but I avoid it.
In the networking wo d,Novell i the equivalent.
veIl i quickly trung together, inelegant,and buggy. In other word, it' a kludge.
o I'm a nob. Ugly oftware ju tdoe n't app al to me. I can program indBa e or COBOL, but I avoid it. In thenetworking world, ovell i the equivalent. Peopl u e it, but I kind of wonderwhy.
till, the imple truth i that ovelletWare i the be t-selling P n twork
ing product on the market. Lot of peopleu it. Lot of p opl even like it.
Why? Well, for one thing, it work.ovell wa the first company to put a fair
ly imple olution on the market for theper onal computer. It made the n tworkerver an exten ion of DO , unlike orne
of it early comp titors, which playedgame with compartment , partition ,and u ed other way to make th erver adifficult and inacce ible object.
For another,ovell put lot of
driver into itpackage. It workwith ARCnet, token ring, andEthernet. ot onlythat, it work withlot of vendor ' implementation ofthe e tandard . Inother word , nomatter who you bought your hardwarefrom, ovell ha a networking olution.
ovell al 0 made it product fa t.ovell etWare con i tently beat the
competition when it come to the basicPC operation: Get a file from the erverand bring it to the work tation. Granted,more ophi ticated operation (uch a
QL-ba ed databa e acce s) don't worka well, but the fundamental operation iolid.
ound pretty good, doe n't it? 0
why do people like me think ovell ranksright up there with a fine meal from Howard John on' ?
"1IIIl"~iiI ow did ovell ever get 0
popular?Umberto Eco, in hi
r c nt novel Foucault'sPendulum, create what
• =11:=1. h call the chool ofComparativ Irrelevance, complet witha departm nt of Tetrapyloctomy (the artof plitting hair four way).
ayb it' ju t a ca e of art imitatinglif , but I'v tarted to think that orne of
ov 1I' marketing manager tudied atthi univer ity (indeed, graduated withhonor ).
Did ov 11' recent announcementof an AA gateway trike auyon el e abizarre?
IB' y tern Application Archi-tecture i a grand vi ion of cooperationamong div r y tern , but 0 far it'pr tt much all in the future ten e. IBMbar Iy ha any AA product. 0 how can
ovell have a product-a gateway, noI ~ready to hip?
Turn out that what it ha i 3270t rminal emulation plu a few bell andwhi tie . When pre ed that 3270 terminal mulator for PC are a dime a doz n,a ovell marketeer conceded the pointbut empha ized that hi gateway couldupport 1,000 current e ion.
ound impre ive, doe n't it? Athou and e ion, all going through aingl PC acting a the gateway.
Unfortunately, it mack of creativeac ounting 'on ovell' part. Ju t for theake of compari on, 1,000 e ion would
take up the entire capacity of four c1u tercontroller .
If thi wer the fir t time thi ort ofthing ha happ ned, I'd write it off toov rzealou marketing. But ovell
em to b making a corporate trategyout of announcing product that don't ex-i t and in orne ca may never exi t.
Wor e, wh n you talk to con ultantand u r, they're almo t univer al inagr ing that what i out there from 0-
DATA COMMUNICATIONS 0 AUGUST 19900.
L\\ YIE\\~
If Novell h dconcentrated on clean,lelant enhancement to
it software, it milht illthe unriva ed leader.
Cart i the author of AnalyzingNovell Networks (Van 0 trand Reinhold,1990) and other networking book.
elegant nhancement to it oftware, itmight till be the unrivaled leader. Butadly, it dominance in the core technol
ogy ha been wa ted.There' a real market opportunity
out th reo ovell obviou ly realizes it'going to have to doomething. Why
el e would it try tomerge with Lotu ?There are certainlyno technical orbu ine rea onthat anyone canee. Why el e
would it keep announcing thing like M gateway ? If itwere truly a technology leader, itwouldn't have to hype imaginaryproduct .•
an Ethernet and a token ring, forexample.
Let' ay we have two Ethernet .ince Ethernet allow a packet to be
around 1,500 byte, ending packet of500 byte between the network i awa te of band-width. But that'exactly what 0
veIl doe : Packetcro ing a ubnetwork boundaryar limited to 576byte.
The fact ofthe matter i 0-
veIl grabbed the market early on, ju t aA hton-Tate did for databa with itdBa II. But look at what' happening todBa e. Real databa e product ar tarting to com out while A hton-Tate i giving new meaning to the word "projectmanagement."
If ovell had concentrated on clean,
t ction ha cau ed enough problem thatovell i going to ubject all etwork
Loadable odule ( LM ) to a rigorouovell te t. Great! It' bad enough having
m certify all oftware; can you imaginehaving it certified by a company alreadyoverloaded by trying to keep up with prematur product announcements?
There's al 0 the "good guy" cheduling algorithm in etWare/386 that enabl a program to keep the CPU forever.A u er enter a ridiculou QL query,10 k up the CPU, and freeze all otheru r out for the next couple of hour .
o t multi-u r operating y tern havea ch duling proce that rotate acceto the CPU among multiple proce e.It' call d time haring.
It' not ju t the operating y ternthat' flawed. Ado e look at the networkr veal orne eriou problem. ovellu a "bridge," which the re t of the indu try call a router, to move packet betw n ubnetwork -two Ethernets or
YOo
• ANALOGIOtGITALLEASED LI ES
• R.F. CHANNEL
• SATELLITECHANNEL
• P.S T.N.
UNIDATADVT·2400
Unidata's DVT-2400 Voice Compression Unit Providesear Toll Quality Voice At 2400 bps
TEL: (201) 262-8800FAX: (201) 262-8833
TLX: 493-1174 UNIO UI
YOU EED DIGITAL OICE AT 2400 bp :• Adds Voice Channel To Exi ting Data Networks• Integrates Voice With Your Unique Sy tern U ing
Narrow BandWidth• Secure Voice Communication• Significant Saving In International/Dome tic
Telephone Co ts
~ U ta 610 Wlnte,. Av nu::: n P rIImu , NJ 07652U.S.A.
OEM .nd dlatrtbutor InquIrtM welcome
OPTIO• PBX Interface (E&M and Loop Start)• Key System Interface• ulti-Channel Cha i• Input: 2 Wire/4 Wire Analog• Output: R5-232C 2400 bp
Synchronou
The Ultimate Solutionat 2400 bps
Circle 40 on Reader Service Card400 DATA COMMUNICATIONS o AUGUST 1990
top related