Novell NetWare Web Server v 1.0
The first Web server from Novell is a poor implementation. While sporting some nice features, including the ability to support perl scripts and server-side includes, the server is difficult to administer and setup, and poorly documented.
Pros: This is one of the few NetWare-based web servers around.
Cons: You'll need Windows 95 or lots of skill at configuring Windows 3.1 to administer this server.
When I first heard about Novell's NetWare Web server, I thought it was a great idea. Like the famous bank robber who said he chose his locale because that's where the money was, NetWare makes sense as a Web server because that is where all your corporate documents are. Linking the Web and NetWare's Directory Services (NDS) is a powerful way to combine two hierarchtical schemes of file directories and hyperlinks. However, the more time I spent with the product, the less enthusiastic I got.
The problem is that this is a bare-bones server that is way behind its competitors. It is difficult to setup, taking the worse aspects of NetWare with those of Windows. It has virtually no documentation: a small quick-start card is included with the CD-ROM, and the remainder of the manual is on-line in the form of Novell's quirky Dynatext pages. (An HTML manual would be better, although it is available at here. And the link between NDS and the Web is a fragile one indeed, although Novell has made lots of promises for future enhancements.
The product was developed with American Internet Corp. and was announced last fall. They sell a version that runs on all of Novell's current servers, including 3.x and 4.x. Novell's Web Server runs on 4.1 only. Installation is definitely not this product's strong suit. You'll need a CD ROM drive on your server, or else have to copy the files from the CD to your server's hard disk. (I used Microtest's DiscPort, which allows a server to mount a CD-ROM drive from over the network.) Next, you'll run through the Novell installation routine. Once that is done, you'll need to have handy a copy of Windows 95 to load the administrative software. (You can use Windows 3.1 too, but I didn't try this and don't recommend it.) You'll also need the 32 bit client for Windows 95, which is a nice fat 5 megabyte file that can be downloaded from Novell's web site, and unfortunately still in beta. You'll also need to configure both your client and your server for TCP/IP support, since the administrative tool doesn't work over IPX. That is nice if you want to administer the server via the Internet, but not so nice if you want to make use of your existing IPX infrastructure. All of this is to manage a bunch of text files that can be edited by any text editor.
Given all this complexity, it isn't any wonder why I had troubles with installation. Getting the documentation running required study of several batch and configuration files that are only documented in a NetWare 4.1 Dynatext manual (luckily, I had a paper copy of it), for example.
There is some good news about NetWare's Web server: it comes with a version of perl that runs as an NLM on your server, although I had to make a few subtle (and not documented) changes to my pre-written scripts that ran just fine on my Unix Web server. There is a feature that allows you to index your documents, although I wasn't able to get this working and the documentation was silent on that score. So who should use this product? If you are new to Web servers, I wouldn't start with this one unless you are loathe to get involved with NT. (O'Reilly's Website, for example, comes with a 400-page book that is tremendous for web newbies.) If you have lots of experience with Unix Web servers, then you probably can get by with Novell'sserver without any of their administration tools and documentation. Finally, if you haven't yet brought up NetWare 4.1, don't start now.
All in all, this is a poor first step in a very important market. And while the market is filling quickly with NT and Unix Web servers, Novell shows exactly why no one is rushing to do the same on the NetWare side: it is just too hard to write good software for this environment, even when it comes from Novell.