All that great netware ip stack gone?

[mrosen]

Marcel,

Marcel Cox wrote:
>
> In the early 90's, Novell had a great TCP/IP protocol stack. However
> technology moved on but TCPIP.NLM did not follow the pace very well (maybe
> this is because the NetWare IP stack was one of the first pieces of
> software offshored to India). The fact is that today, NetWare has a
> relatively poor TCP/IP protocol stack with many limitation, performance
> problems and other problems.

Well, to be entirely fair, it has it quirks, but the vast majority of
especially the performance problems of Netware TCP/IP stack are *not*
limitations of the IP stack itself, but the applciations on Netware
using it. The biggest of all issues is that hardly any Application on
Netware uses Window Scaling, although the IP stack supports it, *and*
it's proven to work every day, as Apache2 in fact uses it. But neither
NCP, iSCSI, CIFS, FTP do, so all of these are effectively unable to
reach even full GB speed *on a single connection*, as the maximum TCP
Window of 64kb that is possible without scaling is simply too small to
saturate a GB connection.

Even compared to Windows it is currently a
> poor implementation. OTOH Linux has one of the best TCP/IP protocol stacks
> around and therefore getting rid of the NetWare TCP/IP protocol stack
> while moving to Linux is one of the better things that happens with the
> move from NetWare to Linux.

I have no idea though, if e.g NCP in OES2 actually uses Window Scaling.
Something I always wanted to test.... <g>

CU,
--
Massimo Rosen
Novell Product Support Forum Sysop
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http://www.cfc-it.de