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Novell Cool Blogs – what a week

by | Mar 10, 2006 | blogging, evilzenscientist, Novell, Uncategorized

Novell Cool Blogs finally went live and public this week – we’ve now got half a dozen regular posters – and seemingly hundreds of readers.

The next challenge is keeping up the quality and quantity of posts; we also plan to add other Novell people to the blogosphere – and finally got out and tell the world about the site!

One challenge we have is making the blog ‘less corporate’ – but still remaining a trusted and valuable source of information.

Written at: Birmingham, England

ZENworks Server Management

by | Mar 10, 2006 | Uncategorized, ZENworks

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I spent the morning with a large, strategic Novell customer who asked a seemingly simple question:

“Can you give us a quick overview of ZENworks for Servers – we have it as part of our MLA and are wondering what to do with it”

A good question isn’t it?

Well – we talked for over an hour about three of the main roles that ZENworks 7 Server Management can play in an enterprise environment. I’ll cover these in a series of posts in the next week.

To start I’ll describe a common administrative headache – updating NetWare.

Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland

Patching and Update for NetWare

Sounds simple eh? But think about what really happens when you have to patch a NetWare server.

Most customers today (the ones that are not using ZENworks) download the Support Pack from Novell, unpack it, test it and then manually copy the Support Pack to servers (lots of XCOPY, batch files and crossed fingers here).

Next notify users that service will be interrupted (even if it is 3am in the morning).

Then it’s RCONSOLE to your server, unload NLMs, start the installation process, reboot and fingers crossed you have a good experience.

That takes time. It’s also not efficient and for everyone concerned about consistency, reliability and uptime this method doesn’t stand up.

Sound familiar? Are you the administrator stuck in the office at the weekend working into the small hours to patch servers?

The answer is to use ZENworks Server Management.

Novell are providing more and more patches and updates for NetWare in the ZENworks CPK format – examples include NetWare support packs, updates for the NetWare Java Virtual Machine, eDirectory – and – the newest addition – ZENworks Support Packs.

My colleague Martin Irwin has also worked to produce a migration from NetWare 6 to Open Enterprise Server using this technology!

Testimony from customers like yourselves really shows the value of this. I have worked with customers who have used ZENworks Server Management to automate NetWare and ZENworks Support Pack installation. They have taken the time needed to deploy from ‘weeks’ to ‘days’ – with a corresponding saving in time and effort.

Let me know your experiences with ZENworks Server Management – there’s a lot more information to share. Next time I will write about how Tiered Electronic Distribution can make the desktop administrators life easy.

Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland

Cool Blogs

by | Mar 9, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

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A great question from a friend in Norway:

# Roger Foss Says:
March 9th, 2006 at 12:57 pm

Please clarify something:

Blogs have traditionally been a little edgy; a place where employees deviate a little from the corporate line.

These cool blogs sound very corporate and official, though. They contrast to the blogs of, say, Miguel and Nat, where you barely see a Novell logo.

So if they are official blogs, how are they different from the newsletters, mailing lists and news groups that already exist?

Its a fair question, no? So we know what to expect.

I think the answer is that we’re just getting going. Most of the bloggers here are new to blogging – and in many cases are being somewhat conservative to see how ‘the powers that be’ react.

There are naturally differences between this Cool Blogs site and the personal blogs of Nat and Miguel (and others..)

We are trying to keep the focus on Novell technology, with blogs written by Novell technologists. We want to be edgy, sometimes irreverent, never irrelevant, occasionally funny and I hope soon a trusted source of information on the inner Novell.

Does this help answer your question? What else would readers like to see here?

Written at: Edinburgh, Scotland