Brian,
A well-designed NW network is a very stable and secure environment.
I used to work for a bank with over 400 NW 4.11 servers. The support team
consisted of myself and two others. We spent all our free time studying
Cisco! The major problem these days is VARs send their MCSE drones to try
to fix these networks, and break all kinds of things. People who don't
understand how NDS works shouldn't be touching it. You'll see issues in MS
like this once (if ever) people start trying to install Active Directory.
All the NW IP clients work great with the 1.1 and 3.x Cisco VPN clients
also, so VPN shouldn't really be an issue. I know for a fact that the NW
client will NOT work through NAT, but no one should be accessing a server
over the internet without encryption anyways.
MS uses tons of broadcasts and directed broadcasts for everything.
It's actually worse than NW these days. Multicasting is the way to go.
Just enable PIM, and all servers and clients can see each other. It's
really easy compared to WINS.
Security holes? You can't possibly think that NW has more security
holes than MS. Even Gartner Group now recommends that companies stay away
from IIS from any internet-accessible servers. Patching NT servers is a
full time job (with no benefits).
P.S. Cisco's stock is pretty crappy right now also (bought some of mine at
$80 :(. But I'm not recommending Foundry to anyone either. Use what you
like,
Chuck Church
CCIE #8776, MCNE, MCSE
Sr. Network Engineer
Magnacom Technologies
140 N. Rt. 303
Valley Cottage, NY 10989
845-267-4000
>If you believe any of this, you can spend $1.50 and own some of the
>Novell Company (stock market). About the cost of a candy bar? My
>experience with Novell you need to spend a lot of effort to get anything
>to work, and there support is non-existant. I have heard of even
>hardcore Novell shops switch to a different OS, after trying Novell 5
>with horror stories. Everything about Novell works with broadcasts that
>flood the network. They are considered a step up from Apple networks
>though, in the unnecessary traffic they create. Recently, I was told I
>needed to make a VPN connection to another company using ADSL, the
>problem is that Novell Client will not work with ADSL. It may work now
>in Novell 6 client. There was a long laundry list of "work arounds", and
>modifications you had to do to get it running. I really don't have this
>kind of patience, so I think they dropped the idea of getting a VPN
>connection into Novell. Some of the fixes were playing games with the
>MTU size to get it to work. The problem with that, is the rest of my
>network is using the ADSL line.
>I think you will find issues with using Pix Firewall with Novell. Novell
>requires so many modifications to make it work, that you will compromise
>performance and security (i.e. "compatability mode), if you can get it
>to work at all. With major security Vulnerabilities like "Denial of
>Service" issues with the Novell VPN.
>I find a lot of people like Novell (and other obsolete OS's) because
>they have good memories of running the 3.xx box on a 386. Maybe back
>then it was worth mentioning. Now, it is full of security holes, and
>bugs that are in the Novell OS which no one bothers to fix. At this
>point, they are just struggling to keep the lights on at Novell.
>Novell got IPX from Xerox anyway, not so innovating at all.
Chuck Church
CCIE #8776, MCNE, MCSE
Sr. Network Engineer
Magnacom Technologies
140 N. Rt. 303
Valley Cottage, NY 10989
845-267-4000
Message Posted at:
http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=51427&t=51427
--------------------------------------------------
FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html
Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
