Netware 6? and WinXP speed 1

[trinitymarie]

Running NW 5.0 with WinXP pro workstations. All run slower than if using Win 98se workstations.
Last year called Novell and asked if upgrading to NW6? would make any speed differences. Was told Slightly. My question is Does anyone know if the latest NW version will work better(faster with WinXP pro.) I'm shying away from going Windows server and I really don't want to put all the workstations back to 98SE. Win2000 wasn't much better on Novell for me either.

 

[marvhuffaker]

It's more of a client / XP issue than server platform that is causing your slowdown.

I hate recommending it because you lose all the features of the client, but you could take the client off and use the Client Services for Netware. If you are only using the server for file/print (assuming queue based), then this works. If you have other services that rely on NDS, then this is a bad solution. Such examples are ZEN, NDPS Printing, Etc.

Another thing you could try, is use NetWare 6.x and then setup CIFS so you can access the Novell server with the Native Windows client. If you need other services, with NetWare 6 you can use addon agents to get access to NDS and the stuff you need. For example, there is an iPrint client.

If either of those don't float your boat, there are several tweaks you can try to speed up things.. Go here, there are lots of good things:

http://www.ithowto.com/novell/clientspeed.htm

Marvin Huffaker MCNE, CNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[terry712]

also have a look at tweakxp.com
xp is a slug - it's slow to ms servers as well
but if you hack it to bits then you can get a decent performance out of it
or go the smarter way and get suse on the desk - it's lightling

 

[trinitymarie]

Thanks for the suggestions from marvhuffaker. I read it and did one of them Changed Network connection setting from Auto sense to 100 Mbs half duplex and it made some improvement in speed through the Switch. I'm really going to look at the rest of them, and try a few more.
To Terry712 I will look into that book, Thanks

 

[ITsmyfault]

There are lots of services that can "go" in XP.. knock the desktop back to the Win2k "look", turn off shadows, etc etc. Lots of extra garbage that just eats CPU. We're running Win2k clients here with client 4.9 Sp2, pure IP (SLP) and it's very fast. What in particular is slow on your network? Check server speed and duplex, and verify settings by moving files back and forth. A normal avg throughput on a 100Mb switched LAN will run roughly 6-8 MB/sec. (so copying a 10 meg file from the server should take just over 10 seconds..) If the autoneg is not working right, it can be as slow as 100KB/s. (painful) make sure that the LAN speed is good before you look to OS issues. AUTO is supposed to be the preferred setting (in the RFC) but many times there is a driver issue of some sort and you wind up being better off running forced 100-full or 100-half. Try them all and see what works the best for you. I force my servers 100-full and some of my workstations as well. (on a case-by case basis - depends on which NIC they have installed)
NW 5 is fine, but it is generally harder to backup properly due to the continuing development of NSS at the time of its release. 5.0 had one version, 5.1 had another. 6.x finally settled a bit and backup solution vendors seem to have a better handle on it. I used to run 5.1 and open files on an NSS volume were always a problem.