Migrating from Novell Netware (Unix based) to Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 (Linux)

Updated 5/27:

Hello all,

Netware 6.5 is set to retire this year.  Netware made a big splash into the academic circle in the 1990s.  This splash can still be felt into the current day.  However in 2003 Novell acquired SUSE.  As of recent this has become a product that Novell has adapted many Netware nlms to.  I’ve seen quite a few Network Admins struggle with Novell’s new OES2 product set to replace Netware.  Is this due to the fact that they are used to Netware?  Perhaps.  I haven’t had any issues with it.  I’ve migrated a minor file server that is meant for storing media files.  Using the migration utility I was able to dump all pictures from its Netware counterpart on it the new server.  Then I used ConsoleOne to add a read/write replica to the device.  The only issues that I’ve noticed is the following:

-NDS time slip:

This is related to the fact I was running OES 2 inside of VMWare 2.x.  This is a known issue, it is quite simple to fix.  Use crontab and have ntpd resync the time every hour via a bash script! (This is very low overhead and as far as I can tell).  But better yet, I think the time sync issue actually went away when I upgrade the VMWare 2.x server from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 LTS!

-EVMS:

Enterprise Volume Management System is a mess and it is due to be replaced by Logical Volume Management in OES3!  I would suggest setting up any Novell server with ext filesystem on your system drive (notice how I didn’t say partition) and then setup your NSS volumes on a seperate hard drive!  Trust me this is a better method.  There are so many issues with Novell’s EVMS that it isn’t even funny!

-Remote Management:

You now have to log in as the local user root and the root password you assigned to the server unless you setup the Linux Users Management Group correctly.

-Context for Drive Mappings:

Novell has changed the standard in yet again.  When you go to map your drives inside of Novell Console one set your context up in the following manner:

MAP X = volumename.tree:/folder_path

Thats because Novell has switched to an open standard.  I’ll add more clarity to these points over the coming days but until then I really hope this helps!