From: skc@Turing.ORG (Shriram K. Chaubal)
Subject: Re: Novell vs. Lan Manager, which one do I choose?
Organization: The Turing Project, Charlottesville Virginia.
Distribution: usa 
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 06:16:49 GMT

In article <254@hitwr.hauppaugeNY.NCR.COM> joeb@hitwr.hauppaugeNY.NCR.COM (Joe Beiter) writes:
>In article <mhart.721582861@blackjack> mhart@blackjack.dt.navy.mil (Michael Hart) writes:
>>In <1992Nov12.132051.8471@uk03.bull.co.uk> pmoore@hemel.bull.co.uk (Paul Moore) writes:
>>
>>>dseeman@novell.com (Daniel Seeman) writes:
>>
>>>My answer is dont touch LAN manager. It big slow complex hard to install on
>>>a PC , big on the PC, not so well supported by 3rd parties ....
>
>I'm also interested in this thread.  Is there anyone that is prehaps running
>both types on the same network?  Our company is 100% Novell and now MIS has
>taken the NCR corporate blessing on Lan Manager (Hey Novell!!!).
>Does anyone know if we should anticipate any problems communicating between
>the two?

There was an article in one of the networking rags a few months ago on
some tests conducted between Novell 3.11, Banyan Vines and LanMan (2.1 I think)
and the results showed that Lan Manager seemed to perform better under stress.

In my experience of dealing with Lan Manager and Novell, while Novell does
have its advantages in terms of easy of installation, possible ease of use
and a major advantage in terms of 3rd party support (atleast in numbers),
LanManager does seem to have a more tolerant protocol (Netbeui), it offers
more fine tuning parameters than the rest of the products *and* is 
supported by most of the vendors that I'd care to deal with.

Lan Manager also seems to have better authentication schemes and its peer
to peer abilities are also a plus. And I'd say a big advantage (ok I am 
setting myself up real bad on this one..) is that it comes from 
Microsoft and will be well supported with Windows for Workgroups and NT.

Also ... NetBeui does use a "sliding window" type scheme for packets
in and out from the server. This is a plus, atleast over Novell 3.11
without additional burst mode support. Also during large file copies
Lan Manager tends to send out 1514 byte packets over the ethernet which
is another plus over Novell, in terms of efficiency. 

I basically work with most of this stuff purely from a development 
point of view (looking at the protocols and other bits and byte oriented
stuff) so please don't ask me about ease of use for the end user. I don't 
consider myself an end-user :-)

About using Novell and Lan Manager, I am using Microsoft's Netware Connectivity,
and that seems to perform without a problem over NDIS. I do have a problem
right now using Novell's Netbios at the same time to communicate with some
IPX/Netbios based gateways but so far that has not turned into an issue that
I have been bothered with.

Shriram

P.S. Oh .. and if it matters all our e-mail, database servers, source
control is Novell based for historical reasons. Atleast at my site.

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Shriram Chaubal					skc@icc.com (it's slow and we
D.C.A                                                        do not get news!)
8230 Montgomery Road, 				skc@turing.org
Cincinnati, OH 45236				70134.3310@compuserve.com
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.novell