I know but I figured it may help anyone else who may want to get a CNA (even though it is very rare now days, LOL).

novell is horrible, my college i went to ran novell netware over the network and with windows 98, the amount of MAJOR security holes in it was unbelivable. im suprised anyone bothers learning novell any more, surelly it would be better to go for win server family, on cisco routing etc?

I don't know about that at all, the guys at your college probably did a terrible job installing it, we have had great luck with Novell and the servers stability is unmatched by the Microsoft servers that we have in use. Considering the need to contantly patch Microsoft's products for security holes I don't think there is much room to talk there. We also use Cisco products and IBM's AIX.

For anyone reading this *VERY* old thread, the reason why Zachery's advise to go with switches instead of hubs is spot on, is that hubs receive packets and distributes them out to all ports regardless of it's one ultimate destination, thereby wasting a lot of bandwidth and slowing down the network segment it's on. Sometime after starting this thread I learned that a switch reads the packet and discerns what interface it is intended to, and then sends it out only to the port that it has associated with that interface. I know this is very old but I'm doing some housing cleaning on setting threats that I stated and have been resolved as solved, and thought this clarification may assist some poor lamented soul out there! :}