For every new machine you install and attach to the LAN, you have to implement security measures. One also assumes that each individual on each host does not have the ability or knowledge to change the host-level security features. Please cc me on replies. Novell can be hacked, and if you leave the network open someone will do it. Here's the worse problem I mentioned.
Lets slow down here.
Firstly, you're in the wrong area. Nextly, Novell is in general orders of magnitude safer than the IP world. This uses IPX as it's underlying transport. IPX not involving NCP or SPX - these are essentially a peer to peer service, which only involves a fileserver if the fileserver happens to be one of the peers involved. An example of this would be NetWare for SAA, which is a IBM 3270 gateway that happens to run on a fileserver platform, as opposed to being stand alone on a non-fileserver box.