Novell's NetWare 3.x network operating system serves as the backbone for corporate enterprise networks of all shapes and sizes. Now the company has released NetWare 3.2, which sports several new utilities including a scheduler, a GUI SYSCON, bundled NLSP (NetWare Link State Protocol) and a server configuration utility for daily NetWare administration.

I tested the NetWare 3.2 Enhancement Pack in Network Computing's San Mateo, Calif., lab when I upgraded one of our internal servers and was impressed with what I saw. The upgrade process was clean, and most important, my server is still working like a champ. NetWare 3.2 is a no-brainer upgrade, especially if your server does not have the latest patches or drivers.

If you have NetWare 3.12 implemented on your network, you can purchase the NetWare 3.2 Enhancement Pack. If your network includes NetWare 3.11 or lower, you can purchase the NetWare 3.2 upgrade.

Making the Upgrade Server administrators often spout four-letter words as they wrestle with angry users, tight budgets and uncooperative software upgrades. With the NetWare 3.2 upgrade from a NetWare 3.12 server, the only appropriate four-letter word was dull--but that's exactly what I was looking for. The upgrade was entirely uneventful and took only a few minutes of my time. NetWare 3.2's inclusion of the latest third-party drivers was quite useful; I upgraded the drivers without worrying about mismatched NLM versions and without having to surf the Internet for the latest drivers for different networks adapters.

After I completed this upgrade, I installed a variety of SCSI and network adapters (both ISA and PCI). The list included 10/100-Mbps Ethernet adapters from Intel Corp., Standard Microsystems Corp. and 3Com Corp.; token-ring adapters from IBM Corp. and Madge Networks; and Adaptec Corp.'s 1542 and 2940W SCSI adapters attached to 2- and 4-GB external SCSI drives. In all, I tested 11 different cards without any problems.

I also installed NetWare 3.2 on two other servers in the lab, a Dell Computer Corp. PowerEdge 2200 and a Compaq Computer Corp. ProLiant 850R. Although these servers use sophisticated RAID arrays, which require special drivers, I didn't have any trouble installing them. And while NetWare 3.2 may not be the sexiest NOS, it does seem to be one of the most reliable.

Not Just a Pretty Face NetWare 3.2 not only provides patch consolidation, it also includes several useful utilities. A new Windows-based SYSCON utility runs under Microsoft Windows95 and NT operating systems. This utility doesn't provide any additional functionality, per se, but it does offer an easy-to-use interface for managing user accounts, groups and policies.

CRON, another useful tool, is an adaptation of the Unix CRON application that provides basic scheduling capabilities. In the lab, CRON performed routine tasks, such as loading or unloading NLMs. However, I was frustrated by its limitations. I couldn't output the results of an event to a log file, and CRON didn't provide any advanced scheduling. If your network requires such advanced options, then you should consider using a third-party scheduling utility.

Keeping track of currently loaded NLMs is often a tedious and time- consuming process, especially if you manage multiple servers. To alleviate this burden, NetWare 3.2 includes the NetWare Config utility, a server-side NLM component (config.nlm) that writes a file to the SYS partition. The second component, a Windows95/NT application, reads the config file and compares the versions of loaded NLMs with a baseline database. You can download the baseline database from Novell's FTP server or another FTP site.

This ability to download the baseline configuration file from a secondary site is crucial. It lets the corporate IT department maintain its list of certified NLMs, which serve as the baseline. In the lab, I compared configurations from several servers and easily determined which servers were out of date. In the next version, I would like to see a one-button download of the latest NLMs and an autoinstall feature.

NetWare 3.2 provides a tbackup NLM utility that lets you back up and restore NetWare 3.2 (or IntranetWare) trustee assignments. While tbackup is useful, this tool is not a replacement for a decent NetWare-compliant backup system, such as Computer Associates International's ARCServe.

Complementary to tbackup, the tcopy feature let me copy the trustee assignments from one directory to another. This utility was very useful when I brought up a new server and created multiple directories with the same trustee assignments.

NetWare 3.2 is also bundled with a two-user version of IntranetWare, as well as the most current NetWare clients. I installed the latest clients on my Windows95 and NT systems without a hitch. But performance-wise, the clients were very sluggish on our Windows95 PC when the server was unavailable. I did not notice this behavior with the Microsoft NetWare client.

Jay Milne can be reached at jmilne@nwc.com.