System information

CHAPTER
Troubleshooting Novell IPX 8-137
8
Troubleshooting Novell IPX
NetWare is a network operating system (NOS) and related support services environment created by
Novell, Inc., and introduced to the market in the early 1980s. Then, networks were small and
predominantly homogeneous; local-area network (LAN) workgroup communication was new; and
the idea of a personal computer (PC) was just becoming popular.
Much of NetWare’s networking technology was derived from Xerox Network Systems (XNS), a
networking system created by Xerox Corporation in the late 1970s.
By the early 1990s, NetWare’s NOS market share had risen to between 50 percent and 75 percent.
With more than 500,000 NetWare networks installed worldwide and an accelerating movement to
connect networks to other networks, NetWare and its supporting protocols often coexist on the same
physical channel with many other popular protocols, including TCP/IP, DECnet, and AppleTalk.
Novell Technology Basics
As an NOS environment, NetWare specifies the upper five layers of the OSI reference model. It
provides file and printer sharing, support for various applications, such as electronic mail transfer
and database access, and other services. Like other NOSs, such as the Network File System (NFS)
from Sun Microsystems, Inc., and LAN Manager from Microsoft Corporation, NetWare is based on
a client/server architecture. In such architectures, clients (sometimes called workstations) request
certain services, such as file and printer access from servers.
Originally, NetWare clients were small PCs, whereas servers were slightly more powerful PCs. As
NetWare became more popular, it was ported to other computing platforms. Currently, NetWare
clients and servers can be represented by virtually any kind of computer system, from PCs to
mainframes.
A primary characteristic of the client/server system is that remote access is transparent to the user.
This is accomplished through remote procedure calls, a process by which a local computer program
running on a client sends a procedure call to a remote server. The server executes the remote
procedure call and returns the requested information to the local computer client.
Figure 8-1 illustrates a simplified view of NetWare’s best-known protocols and their relationship to
the OSI reference model. With appropriate drivers, NetWare can run on any media-access protocol.
The figure lists those media-access protocols currently supported with NetWare drivers.