SNEAK PREVIEWS

Novell Vs. Microsoft: Battle At The Client Level

For this round, the winner depends on your site. If the site is a NetWare shop that wants to use NT on the desktop, then the clear choice is the IntranetWare Client for Windows NT, since it makes NetWare the primary user authentication source. Features such as the one-button install, fault-tolerant client, Automatic Client update and the NetWare Application Launcher also give it a leg up. For shops that have NT and need to access occasional services on NetWare, the Microsoft client that comes with 4.0 will suffice.

Waging War The IntranetWare Client for Windows NT offers very simple, one-step installation that is almost too easy. Once installed, the NetWare client replaces the usual NT login process. One advantage tha t the NetWare client has over the default Microsoft client is the ability to customize the bitmap displayed before login.

One key difference between Novell's client and Microsoft's client is the order of authentication. With Microsoft, you log in to an NT account and then authenticate to a NetWare server. In this case, you must create NT and NetWare accounts for users. For IS shops that have invested heavily in a NetWare back end, two accounts must be maintained.

We ran into a "gotcha" when setting up the AutoAdminLogon option. We logged into the NT workstation as an administrator using the "workstation only login" option. After setting the AutoAdminLogon options and restarting the machine, we could only log in to the NT workstation, and we were not allowed to enter any NetWare user name/

password. Depending on the NT registry-access level of the account used to log in to the NT workstation, you may end up doing some remote registry editing from a different workstation to get around this problem. Novell did not have any other solution and plans to remedy the situation for the final release.

We encountered another sticky situation with the login-script processing and Novell's client. When a program is launched inside the login script and exits with an error level, the NT client always reports that no errors occurred. This single bug has been present in every variant of the Client32 open beta releases of Novell's clients: Client32 for Win95 and Client32 for DOS/Windows. Fortunately, it was fixed in the final release versions of Client32 and should be corrected in the NT client, too.

Novell's client can also store the user profile on the NetWare server. As you roam from machine to machine, your preferences for the desktop will stick with the users' account. In this way, as you log in to different workstations you will see familiar settings. Once logged into the network, we did not run into any problems, and our NetWare-aware programs, including custom uti lities, ran smoothly.

James E. Drews is a network administrator for the Computer Aided Engineering Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He can be reached at drews@engr.wisc.edu.