Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!bellcore!porthos!cellar.bae.bellcore.com!louie
From: louie@cellar.bae.bellcore.com (Paul Louie)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Netware or Lantastic
Message-ID: <1991Jan8.173205.7628@porthos.cc.bellcore.com>
Date: 8 Jan 91 17:32:05 GMT
Sender: @porthos.cc.bellcore.com
Reply-To: louie@cellar.bae.bellcore.com (Paul Louie)
Organization: Bell Communications Research
Lines: 48

In article <22157@rouge.usl.edu> pcb@cacs.usl.edu (Peter C. Bahrs) writes:
>I have used netware 2.15a for 2 years and lantastic 3.02 for 3 months.
>Netware is 20+ diskettes, lantastic is 1.
>
>I am not sure what netware has over lantastic yet, except a bunch of
>utility programs.  How would you answer the statement:
>  Is lantastic just as good as netware?
>
>Please post responses to the net or email to me.

Well, having 1 of anything wouldn't reveal much.

The answer is file access speed.  For a long time there are nothing on the
market (PC platform, of course) can match NW 286.  Lately, the IBM and MS
gang come up with LAN Manager that in parity.  But, then the Novell folks
have NW 386, which is still king of the hill when it comes to speed contest.
For awhile, the IBM/MS guys' argument is that NW is a proprietary and close
system.  Well in a few months NLM for MACs and NLM for TCP/IP and MHS would
be available.  How more open can you get.  Besides, in a user's view he can
find that every apps on the market support NW (To be expected when Novell has
a market share in Net O/S approaching 70%).  So, it was really a moot 
point to begin with.

No I'm not affiliate with Novell in any way, shape, or form. It's just that
I have opportunities to experience many Net O/S's and NW has the most
usability overall.

Anyway, back to your point - if you want to compare O/S's it
is pretty simple to do.  What I did was that I written a simple program to
copy a test file on the server(content and size are irrelevant) to a target 
subdirectory that is on the work station's hard disk.  A counter is incremented
after each copy and value became the next target file's name.  Now on all
other stations I just run a batch file that do recursive copy of the test
file to something fast, like a VDISK.  The procedure is this - I run the 
batch file on as many stations as I can get my hands on.  Then I go back
to the station with the hard disk and I start my test program and let it
run for 1 minute.  Afterward I do a DIR and look for the highest file name
(which is how many time I copied the test file).  It sounds simple and might
not be the most elegant, but it is accurate enough to tell me who is the 
fastest.



Paul



P.S. - Of course, if you can use the same HW for each O/S the better.