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Microsoft Gets You From NetWare To NT

In the battle for network operating system supremacy, Microsoft is finalizing a new weapon that could make it easier to move customers from NetWare to NT: File and Print Services for NetWare (FPNW). The NetWare emulation on an NT 3.5 server looks reasonably functional but not particularly earth-shattering.

FPNW provides NetWare-compatible file and print services. Regular NetWare PC clients running normal NetWare client software can see the FPNW server via IPX/SPX protocols, just like they see a NetWare server. The FPNW server can even be the only NetWare server on the network, responding to Get Nearest Server requests, assigning network numbers, and letting NetWare clients login and execute their login scripts.

Since it's intended to provide an easy way to move NetWare environments onto NT, FPNW includes a migration utility to copy NetWare users and files over to FPNW.

Other common NetWare functions, however, aren't supported on FPNW. FPNW can't run NetWare Loadable Modules (NLMs), can't route IPX and offers no Unix interoperability. Then again, these features aren't available on regular NT either.

In other cases, NT can provide corresponding NetWare services, like Macintosh client support.

You can't assume the conversion process will provide exactly the same functionality on the NT FPNW server as you get on an existing NetWare server. If you need basic file and print services, FPNW should do the job.

Easier Migration

Unfortunately, NetWare and NT still have different security models and capabilities, so some things are lost in the migration. Gone are user disk quotas and the inherited rights mask security model. Some login script functions may not work after migration, but Microsoft assured us that "#" functions should work in the production version, despite not working in the beta. The migration utility can't move the NetWare-encrypted passwords, so users have to reset their security after the move.

After moving a server's file system over, it's no longer fully manageable with NetWare utilities like SYSCON or RCONSOLE. While SYSCON still functions against the new FPNW server (RCONSOLE does not), not all security options are supported. Moreover, not all NT server administration is supported from NetWare-only utilities. Instead, you must be able to administer the NT server. Microsoft has extended the NT administration utilities to control the converted NetWare users and file system, but these utilities run only on NT or on Windows machines with the Win32 DLLs.

Interestingly enough, these Microsoft administration utilities did not include the ability to change user or system login scripts; we had to set up the Windows NotePad to open directly those text files after changing their read-only attributes manually. Microsoft indicated it would be updating its Windows utilities by production time to support Windows-based FPNW NetWare account administration.

FPNW works with the NT domain system to replicate the NetWare user accounts to other FPNW servers in the same domain. Compared with the normal NetWare 3.x single-server bindery, multiserver account administration is a helpful benefit. FPNW does not, however, support NetWare 4.x's NDS directory.

Why Emulate NetWare?

The most intriguing use of FPNW will be to consolidate what might ordinarily be two separate servers in a classic NetWare environment. With NT becoming popular for relational database management systems (RDBMSes) and other application services, adding a bit of NetWare file and print services will be helpful for customers trying to consolidate servers-particularly smaller sites.

File and Print Services for NetWare.

Bruce Robertson can be reached at brobertson@nwc.com.