recommended reading on Novell?

[aeinstein]

can anyone (guru's included, hint, hint!) make a recommendation(s) on a book(s) towards gaining a cne via cna? i'm totally new to novell (aside from longtime enduser), but i'm NOT looking for a 'dummy'/'idiots' style study guide; the meatier the better so long as the material is covered from scratch on up. i'm sure there's many good tombe's for experienced admin's, so getting one all inclusive test prep may be too much to expect, so if a 'starter' book is the way to go so be it, i'm open to, and appreciative of, your suggestions.

also, i'm currently studying for my ccna cert & i expect to setup a network lab within the next 2 or 3 months (due to $$$ considerations). i expect the lab will consist of 2 or 3 cisco 2500 series routers, a switch (or switches), multiple servers, hubs and clients, maybe a network printer, etc. towards that end if you have a recommendation to include any reasonably priced (<$1K) network component into the lab in order to more realistically simulate a novell network environment i would, again, greatly appreciate it (for the record, it's my understanding that Novell is a NOS management environment, not a hardware implementation).

[Zachery]

well to start with networking, i wouldnt suggest 2500 serries as they are old and out dated, id suggest learning howto do shit on the new 2600 serries, there about as expensive as the 2500 serries used to be.. no hubs fyi ;D. for Novell id suggest buying their student books that they have for their classes i found it highly usefull for when i was learning CNA materials, of course i was a student then ^^. i still have the book. if your going to be studying for CCNA see if you can find someone else who is taking the classes and get the CCNA class material from them.

Back to Novell. its an ok system, it is a NOS it has no real workstation features. its most command line and gui is 100% java and horrid to work with if its not nessary.

[aeinstein]

thanks for the info on the Novell books. unless the 2600's are significantly different to config i'm likely to still opt for the 2500s - this is afterall for a personal pc lab & not a commercial venture (otherwise, the 2600's would make sense 4 sure). u seem to naysay the hub's...?! router>server>hub>client is what i'm tentatively planning - once i get a bit deeper into my ccna studies i'll be firming that up. thanks again for the heads up.

[Zachery]

yes they are quite abit differnt. 2500's are just waht they are 2500's they arnt modual at all. 2600's are totaly modual everything can be loaded and unload and they can have any type of port you buy for them. but as its a personall lab you can probally stick with 2500's

never go into hubs. hubs are a waste of bw. they will clog the network swiches should always be used in place of hubs

[aeinstein]

i was a contractor for a global services company for a couple of yrs and most of "our" clients used large LANs w/racks - sometimes a large room filled w/racks - of hubs, albeit typically smart hubs; so there's gotta be something giving on that. maybe a price/performance issue... at any rate, for my lab purposes i'm pretty sure hubs are what i need, but b4 it comes time to drop the dimes i'll do a needs analysis comparing hubs & switches. thanks for the input.

(btw, who's calling the kettle black here on posting in English, dude! :p ;) )

[tayloric]

By far the best books for studying anything Novell are the books from or recommended by Novell. They have the most current and up to date information and are obviously the most accurate. There are other good books out there but for my money I buy the Novell books or recommended books 99% of the time.

[kerubo]

Please supply me with a list of novell books

[kerubo]

i know nothing about novell so how can you assist

[borumas]

Get a book from the Novell Press, here is the CNA book: http://www.novell.com/training/books/book.html?book=bookCrt&val=0
I failed the Novell 6 CNA test by 5 questions and I'm going to retake it soon, if you can find or purchase a preptest online it could be a big help as well as many of the questions I saw were on the preptest but there were several not on there that gave me trouble.

[Zachery]

psst really old thread ;)

[borumas]

psst really old thread ;)

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).

[suRoot]

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?

[borumas]

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.

[aeinstein]

yes they are quite abit differnt. 2500's are just waht they are 2500's they arnt modual at all. 2600's are totaly modual everything can be loaded and unload and they can have any type of port you buy for them. but as its a personall lab you can probally stick with 2500's

never go into hubs. hubs are a waste of bw. they will clog the network swiches should always be used in place of hubs

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! :}