Campus Migration to Novell Netware 6 — Aug. 9 - 11
Frequently Asked Questions

NOTE: Files & Printers using Novell will NOT BE ACCESSIBLE from Friday August 9th at 7:00pm until Sunday August 11th at 9:00pm

Over the past few months the Office of Information Technology has been engineering and testing a new Novell 6 environment in order to add more flexibility, increased performance and greater reliability to the UMBC community.

Novell has informed us that support for our existing Novell 4 servers will no longer be available within about one year. Given this time constraint we did not want to wait until next year to complete an infrastructure change of this magnitude since the PeopleSoft initiative will be coming online in 2003. After considering these factors it became clear that a new solution was needed and that it should be implemented this summer rather than waiting until next year when it might conflict with the PeopleSoft initiative.

Presently OIT is running two Novell 4 servers, commonly known as Novell 1 and Novell 2. These two machines provide the majority of file and print sharing on campus.

Netware (Novell) 6 offers new features such as clustering, which will allow us to have redundancy in the event of a hardware failure, as well as a new Web Interface that will allow you to save and retrieve files stored on the Novell servers from any machine that has a Web browser and an Internet connection.. Another consequence of the new Netware 6 environment is that we now have more storage space for departmental files.

The migration is expected to take the entire weekend, August 9 through 11, to complete. While we are working on this the Novell servers will not be available. This means that all printing and file access via the Novell 1 and Novell 2 servers will NOT work during this weekend. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause you. We would like to suggest that you copy any files that you need to work on over the weekend to your local machine. You can work on them over the weekend and then copy them back on Monday.

Other than the server names being different on the new servers we do not anticipate any changes that will affect you. All of the drive letters, files, account names, passwords and printers will remain the same as they are now.