From: brianb@wc.novell.com (Brian Bulkowski)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.comm,comp.protocols.appletalk,comp.sys.novell
Subject: Dayna's Netmounter - REVIEW
Date: 6 Oct 92 00:34:23 GMT
Organization: Novell, Inc

Review Abstract:
NetMounter didn't work well for me. It crashed multiple times, seemed
slow, wouldn't see all items on the Novell servers. Unusable. This is 
probably due to the size of our network. Beware of installing NetMounter
into large sites. Tech support was courteous but clueless (whelp, never
heard of that problem before...). I suspect it works fine for smaller
situations.

Hi -
I received a demo copy of Dayna's NetMounter about a week ago
from the Grant Jones, the kindly product manager, and I'd like
to share my experiences. NetMounter is an IPX/NCP implimentation for
the Mac that allows the Mac to log onto NetWare servers without
any AppleTalk routers or Novell Macintosh products. It does require
software at every client, which Netware for Macintosh doesn't.
Netware for Macintosh is software for each server. Netware for Macintosh
and NetMounter partially compete.

First, my basic predjudices. I work for Novell, and although Dayna
did a lot of the 1.x and 2.x Netware for macintosh work, we got a
bit upset at them for releasing the NetMounter product. Netmounter
is positioned at smaller shops with 1 or 2 macintoshes, so it shouldn't
clash with Netware for Mac, which is positioned at shops with many,
many macs. I work on the Netware for Mac programming team. I believe
that the win of not having to route or configure AppleTalk would be
a big win for larger sites.

Our network here consists of several hundred servers in about 4
SAP domains. I have about 200 servers visible from my corner of
my ethernet. These servers are mostly on this continent, and everything
off site is connected by various numbers of T1 lines. We have some links
off the continent.

When I installed NetMounter, then opened the chooser, my mac hung forever.
Great. So I restarted, opened up the control panel, and fiddled around
a bit. Everything seemed correct, but for fun I put in a default server
and restarted again, this time I could open the chooser and see servers.
I mounted a server, and things felt slow. Using a simple read/write file
test, going over appleTalk to the same server was getting about 100KB/s
throughput, while NetMounter got about 50KB/s. When I opened the volume,
I saw about half the folders that should have been there. I opened
one of the ones that should have been there. I saw half the folders that
were under there. Even in a folder with 10 subfolders, I saw about 5
of them.

Then I opened up the chooser, and it crashed again.

When I opened the chooser next, I couldn't find any of my local servers,
including the one on the other side of my office. It appeared that the
mac had gotten its SAP list from some San Jose machine on the other side
of the SAP filters, so I saw all the San Jose local servers, not the
Walnut Creek ones. Even though I had a prefered server set.

I called tech support, and they weren't there. I called Mr. Jones, who
promised to have tech support call me back. I called tech support again,
and was quickly escalated. The tech support person had me try a few things,
but couldn't think of any reason it would fail like this, had never heard
of any problems like that. The person also suggested that

I found NetMounter completly unusable for my application, and abandoned it.
Perhaps it works well on small networks, but it seems that its strength
is on big networks, where a mac could go wherever a PC can go. No AppleTalk
network design. No load mac name space. I wasn't able to try their extension
mapping and desktop database stuff. I really wanted it to work.

NetMounter is missing one feature, IMHO, which is the ability to access
servers that don't have the mac name space loaded. On these servers, Macs
couldn't save resource forks, but they would be able to access and save
data forks. Lotus, WordPerfect, Microsoft all don't use resource forks in
their products that are cross platform (1-2-3, WP, Word, Excell...), so
this isn't such a bad limitation.

Hope this helps some of y'all,
Brian Bulkowski
brianb@wc.novell.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.comm