NetWare is a network operating system and the set of network protocols it uses to talk to client machines on the network. Developed by Novell, the NetWare operating system is a proprietary system using cooperative multitasking to run various services on a PC, and the network protocols were based on the archetypal Xerox XNS stack. Today NetWare supports TCP/IP as well as IPX/SPX. NetWare was one of a series of XNS-based systems, which also included Banyan VINES and Ungerman-Bass Net/One. Unlike these products, and XNS itself, NetWare established a strong presence in the market in the early 1990s, and managed to barely survive the onslaught of Microsoft's Windows NT which killed off the other players.

Netware evolved from a very simple concept : one or more dedicated servers were connected to the network, and shared disk space in the form of volumes. Clients running MS-DOS would run a special Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) program that allowed them to map a volume as if it was a local hard disk. Clients had to log-in in order to be allowed to map volumes, and access could be restricted according to the log-in name.

Similarly, clients could connect to shared printers on the dedicated server, and print as if the printer was connected locally.

While early Netware systems did entirely trust all modules (any misbehaving module could bring the whole system down), it was very stable. There are reports of Netware servers running for years without any human intervention.

History

Netware was based on the work of SuperSet (Drew Major, Dale Neibauer, Kyle Powell and Mark Hurst), based on their classwork at Brigham Young University, starting in October 1981. NetWare is based on NCP, or the NetWare Core Protocol, which is a packet-based protocol that enables a client to send requests to and receive replies from a NetWare server. Initially NCP was directly tied to the IPX/SPX protocol, which meant that natively, NetWare could only communicate using IPX/SPX. The embedded database technology used to store authentication information was Btrieve.

The first product to bear the Netware name was released in 1983. It was called Netware 68 (aka S-Net); it ran on the Motorola 68000 processor and used a Star topology. It was replaced in 1985 with Netware 86, which was written for the Intel 8086. After the Intel 80286 processor came out, Novell released Netware 286 in 1986. The same happened with the release of the Intel 80386; Novell released Netware 386 in 1989. Later, Novell consolidated the numbering of their Netware releases, with Netware 286 becoming Netware 2.x, and Netware 386 becoming Netware 3.x

NetWare version 2 was notoriously difficult to configure : any change required a recompilation of the kernel, and a reboot of the system. Recompiling and reinstalling the kernel required about 20 diskette swaps. NetWare was administered using text-based utilities such as SYSCON. The file system used by Netware 2 was Netware File System 286, or NWFS 286.

NetWare version 3 eased things a bit by modularization. Each functionality was controlled by a software module called a NetWare Loadable Module (NLM) loaded either at startup or when it was needed. It was then possible to add functionality such as anti-viruses, backup software, long name support (remember, this was the time where filenames were limited to 8 characters plus a three letter extension) or Macintosh style files. NetWare continued to be administered using text-based utilities. The file system introduced by Netware 3.x and used by default until Netware 5.x was Netware File System 386, or NWFS 386.

Initially, NetWare used Bindery services for authentication. This was a stand-alone system where all user access and security data resided individually on each server. When an infrastructure contained more than one server, users had to log-in to each of them individually, and each server had to be configured with the list of all allowed users.

Version 4 introduced the Novell Directory Services (NDS) where bindery services was replaced by a global directory service where the infrastructure was described and managed in a single place. This allowed a single user authentication to NDS to permit access to any server in the directory tree structure (security permitting). Users could therefore access network resources no matter on which server they resided. Version 4 also introduced a number of useful tools and utilities, including Novell Distributed Print Services (NDPS), JAVA support, and RSA public/private encryption.

NetWare released version 4.11, also called intraNetWare, which included many enhancements that made the operating system easier to install, easier to operate, faster, and more stable. It also included the first fully 32-bit client for Windows-based workstations, and the NetWare Administrator (NWADMIN or NWADMN32), a GUI-based administration tool for NetWare. By this time, Novell was still tied to IPX/SPX by the NCP reliance on that protocol, but they started to acknowledge the demand for TCP/IP with NetWare 4.11 by including tools and utilities that made it easier to create intranets and link networks to the Internet. Novell bundled handy tools, such as the IPX/IP gateway, to ease the connection between IPX workstations and IP networks. And, for the first time, Novell included an application called Webserver, which lets you create and host Web sites on NetWare servers. It also began integrating Internet technologies and support through features such as natively hosted Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and Domain Name System (DNS).

During this time Novell also realized the importance of leveraging its directory service, NDS, by tying their other products into the directory. Their e-mail system, GroupWise, was integrated with NDS, and Novell released many other directory-enabled products like ZENworks, BorderManager, Novell Modular Authentication Services, etc.

With the introduction of NetWare 5, Novell finally acknowledged the prominence of the Internet by switching its primary NCP interface from the IPX/SPX network protocol to TCP/IP. IPX/SPX was still supported, but the emphasis shifted to TCP/IP. Most Novell utilities and third party products had to be rewritten to work with TCP/IP instead of IPX/SPX. NetWare 5 also shipped its first java-based GUI administration console, ConsoleOne, in addition to its NWAdmin series of utilities.

NetWare 5 was released during a time when NetWare market share dropped, as it was massively replaced by Windows NT servers. They also released their last upgrade to the NetWare 4 operating system with the release of NetWare 4.2.

The last release of NetWare 5 was version 5.1. The NetWare 5.x product introduced a number of useful tools, including support for Storage Area Networks (SANs) and clustered servers, NSS (Novell Storage Services, a replacement for the traditional NWFS, or Netware File System), Certificate Services, IBM WebSphere, Multimedia Services, Web Search Services, Oracle 8, Novell SQL, and Public Key Infrastructure Services (PKIS), to name a few.

NetWare 6 continued the trend by offering improved Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) support (for improved support of multiple processors in a single server), iFolder (to provide web-based, location-independent access to documents), iManager (web-based administration for NetWare), Native File Access System (NFAS, to provide native Windows, Macintosh, and Linux access to files on a NetWare server), NetDrive (allowing a drive letter to be mapped to an FTP site), and a move from the Netscape Enterprise Server to Apache as the default web server. Also, the Btrieve database (used in all previous versions of NetWare) was replaced with Pervasive SQL.

The latest release is version 6.5. Novell has announced an integration of NetWare applications over a Linux kernel from its next release (version 7.0) Also, consequent to Novell's acquisitions of Ximian and SuSE, a German Linux distributor, it is widely observed that Novell may be moving away from NetWare and shifting its focus towards porting applications to Linux. Officially though, Novell denies these claims (http://www.novell.com/products/netware/vp_interview.html) and says it will focus on both NetWare and Linux.

See Also

• Comparison of operating systems

External link

• Netware home page (http://www.novell.com/products/netware/)
• Early history of Netware (http://www.novell.com/connectionmagazine/2000/05/retro50i.final.pdf) (PDF)
• A brief history of Netware (http://docs.rinet.ru/NeHi/ch22/ch22.htm)
• Another brief history of Netware (http://www.krakau-inc.com/199406.htm)
• A mostly Korean-text history of networking (http://www.ebora.net/htmlup2/lan-tech1.htm)