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Novera EPIC: An Alternative NOS
The marketing noise the last year or so has been about the incredible potential of Java, LDAP and the intranet--but useful and practical applications have remained as scarce as hen's teeth. Now there's Novera's EPIC (Enterprise Platform for Internet Components). EPIC by no means replaces the traditional NOS; it's more of an application that builds on the underlying services of the operating system on which it it runs, which is any operating system that supports the JVM (Java Virtual Machine).

Novera touts its EPIC product as a scalable, NOS-independent, Java-based netwo rk operating system. EPIC offers some of the facilities of a traditional NOS--access control and authentication, file and print services, programming APIs and some basic user applications such as word processor and terminal utility. But we found it does not offer the same level of functionality in important areas, such as user administration, performance or flexibility as found in traditional NOSes.

To see how well EPIC worked, we installed it in our distributed test lab and asked users from both local (San Mateo, Calif.) and remote sites (Madison, Wis., and Syracuse, N.Y.) to log into our EPIC server via the frame relay connection. We ran the EPIC kernel on Windows NT Server 4.0 using Internet Information Server 3.0; the LDAP server was Netscape Communications Corp.'s Directory Server running on a second NT Server 4.0 system.

EPIC provides services and applications to users who log on and are authenticated in the LDAP directory. But you still need to run the EPIC kernel application on an operating syst em. Within EPIC, an administrator can expose network resources, such as file systems or printers, to EPIC users. The only resources EPIC provides are ones the EPIC kernel can access.

In several instances, the various Java applets did not work with our Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02 browser. According to Novera, some of these performance issues are related to the way the Web browser caches the Java classes. We tried to connect a user via a dial-up connection at 28.8 Kbps but this was bad news. After about 30 minutes of downloading more than 8 MB of files, we gave up. We also tested over a frame relay connection, but here too performance was somewhat sluggish. To run EPIC most efficiently, you need at least a T1 connection between the user's Web browser and the EPIC kernel being used.

While the various EPIC Java applets worked fine on a variety of platforms, from Windows95 using Netscape 4.0 to a SunSoft Solaris 2.6 workstation to a Macintosh, we did not like the interface. It is somewhat kludgy and do es not provide any sort of drag-and-drop functionality.

For a 1.0 product, EPIC works fairly well, but it has a way to go before it will supplant traditional NOSes. For instance, EPIC lacks any sort of user account management features, such as password restrictions, minimum password length, password expiration date and automatic account lockout.

We also found that the EPIC kernel runs as an NT application and not as a service, a major hole in the product. When our LDAP directory service went down and then was brought up again, the EPIC kernel shut down without any notification. You can set up alternate LDAP servers that EPIC will connect to in the event it cannot communicate with the primary LDAP server. EPIC 1.3 is not industrial strength yet, but version 2.0--officially released just as we went to print--will address many of the problems in 1.3.