Brainshare 2005 Show Report

However, if you look at the external message that Novell is sending, it appears that NetWare is dead. The company is planning a 64-bit OES, but it's the Linux flavor. Other product groups are going to add features to their OES components, but only on the Linux side. Novell obviously has a problem with its marketing message. Perhaps it would be in Novell's best interest to make a statement like it did with GroupWise and guarantee NetWare kernel support for at least xx-number of years.

Based on the sessions and from talking with people, nothing beats the NetWare kernel as a file server. Novell said in one of the breakout sessions that the NSS file system on Linux performs 21 to 47 percent slower than it does on NetWare, depending on the workload. NSS on Linux is comparable to some of the other file systems available for Linux.

In a session on optimizing performance on SLES Linux, Novell offered the good advice of using the appropriate file system for the task. If you don't need the rich features of an NSS file system, don't use it. If you have a system that uses lots of temporary files and does its own transaction management, a file system that doesn't have journaling--like EXT2--would be a good choice. If you need to store millions of small files, Riser will be a good choice; because its metadata overhead is less, it will need less space on the disk per file.

Another issue with NSS on Linux (in my opinion) is that it is limited to the kernel memory space for its file cache buffers. So if you have a box doing nothing but file serving and you have, say, four gigabytes of RAM in it, NSS cache is limited to one gigabyte. And in reality, it's less than that. The NSS team is working to get around that problem, but it sounds like NSS feature trade-offs will be necessary to make it happen.Work is still being done in the NetWare kernel area. Demos were being conducted in the lab, and NetWare kernel used in the Friday keynote was running in a ring 1 virtualization module on a Linux box using the XEN virtualization project.

XEN is kind of a cool project. The demo showed a few virtualized servers running on three SLES boxes, and you can move these virtualized machines around. When you tell a virtual machine to migrate, it starts by moving inactive memory pages. After it has moved what it can, the virtualized machine stops the virtual machine, moves the remaining memory pages and starts the virtual memory on the new machine. In the end, there are just few seconds during which the virtual memory isn't actually running. It's very cool. Friday's keynote statement about this says Novell's goal is to make moving a virtualized machine to a different physical machine take just a few milliseconds. (It took a couple seconds in the demo, so the streaming video app stalled for a bit.) The idea isthat XEN will show up as a preview in the SUSE Pro 9.3 release, due out in April, and that the real thing will be in the SLES 10 release by earlynext year.

Mono is still getting lots of hype, but I haven't seen much adoption since last year. Novell is busily working on completing a full port of the System.Windows.Forms set of APIs, with a goal of the Mono 1.2 release this summer. Why is this important? Well, all those .NET developers writing apps using SWF will be able to run their apps via Mono on Linux and Mac computers (assuming the application doesn't do things like use ActiveX controls).

I went to a session on SWF development. It had a demo app Novell got from the Microsoft Tereaserver site, and showed it running on Windows and Linux. It looked the same and operated the same, using the same binary file. The client side of ZEN Linux Management was written using Mono, so Novell is starting to use it internally. And yes, there is someone working on porting the Mono runtime to NetWare. Another Mono application that shows things quite well is f-spot, a photo management application.

On the Linux desktop side, some interesting things are in the works. Novell is working on writing a full NCP client for Linux. The goal of this client is to be able to let administrators use the same login scripts Windows clients use. In closed beta now, the client is expected for release this summer. This will let users gain access to their files running on a NetWare 5.x or 6.x server over the IP protocol. No IPX support is planned.One other cool Linux project is Beagle. The easiest way to think about this project is that it delivers what Microsoft promises in WinFS today. It is a tool that will let you index your "stuff" and be able to search and find things in real time. I say "stuff" because various plug-ins let you plug it into your file system, evolution, IM clients, visited Web pages, etc., and it's real-time. For example, when you search for something like "brainshare," the results pop up. Then 10 minutes later, someone sends you an IM with the word brainshare in it. With the plug-in, the info in that IM will show up in the results list just as fast as it showed up in the IM window.

I spent lots of time in sessions, including developer sessions on the LSB (Linux Standard Base) specification. This is important because it lets users, administrators and application developers use and create applications that should run on any LSB-compliant system. The SLES 9 SP1 is now LSB 2.0 certified, so as customers, we need to keep after the Linux distribution vendors and application vendors to make sure they comply with the LSB. Complain to LSB-compliant vendors; after all, it's in their best interest to comply.

James E. Drews is a network administrator for the CAE Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Send your comments on this article to him at [email protected].