In This Part
NetWare recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, and yet for some of you, NetWare 6.5 might be the beginning of your experience with the network operating system. Others have almost certainly been working with NetWare for many years , and this is another upgrade of the industry's premier net operating system. Yet others lie somewhere in between these two extremes.
One of its most unique characteristics of NetWare is the fact that it was designed specifically for the server tasks of network storage, file sharing, print sharing, and network services. Today, the network is the Internet, and files are shared via Web servers, Web services, and Web browsers, but make no mistake that it's still file sharing, and NetWare 6.5 is eminently qualified to play in this exciting new arena. NetWare operates as part of the network "plumbing," and is performing at its best when users don't even realize it's there. Basic design decisions were made to make NetWare the best at performing these tasks , and more than 20 years later, NetWare continues to be the world's best network operating system. The capabilities of a specialized Net operating system such as NetWare continue to prove their worth in the face of ever-mounting evidence that a general-purpose operating system is incapable of delivering the necessary levels of performance and security required by today's mission-critical Net environments.
Global business networks and the Internet now require distributed Net storage, transparent access to Net data, and a consistent Net experience, regardless of location or access method. These are all requirements well within the original design vision for NetWare, and Novell effectively delivers these capabilities, and many more, in the form of NetWare 6.5.
The three chapters comprising Part I of this book begin by taking you through the NetWare 6.5 installation process. They introduce the major components of a NetWare environmentnamely the NetWare server, the latest Novell clientsand the latest generation of management tools designed to keep everything on an even keel.
