Networking —

NetWare Print Services

Printing with NetWare can be implemented in a variety of ways. Traditionally, printers were defined on the server, and print queues were associated with those printers. In NetWare 6, a feature called Novell Distributed Print Services was introduced, which enables a more dynamic printing environment to be created. NetWare 6 also introduced a new feature called iPrint, which allows users to see graphical maps of the network and point and click to access network devices.

To access a printer on NetWare, clients capture the output that would normally be directed to a local printer port and send it to the network printer. In early versions of NetWare, this was a process performed by using a command-line utility, called capture. Today, the process has been hidden behind the graphical interface of the client software and is largely unnoticed.

NetWare Application Support

Although application support will always be a topic of much debate, the reality is that third-party application support for NetWare is not nearly at the same level as it is for the Windows server platforms. NetWare would even have a hard time competing against Linux in this respect. However, many applications are available for NetWare, and you are likely to have a choice of applications for any given purpose.

Even though third-party support might be lacking, the applications included with the NetWare package provide many of the commonly desired network services. This includes a DHCP server, a DNS server, and a Web server application, as well as a range of other services.