Novell’s headquarters is returning to Provo, where it was born 32 years ago

The privately held Attachmate Group of Houston announced Wednesday it has completed its $2.2 billion purchase of Novell Inc., the Utah-founded technology company that remains one of the state’s largest high-tech operations.

The deal was announced late last year after Novell had put itself up for sale in the wake of an unsolicited offer to buy the company. It closed Wednesday morning, and Novell’s shares ceased trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange at the close of business.

Novell was founded in 1979 in Provo as Novell Data Systems. Its headquarters was moved to Waltham, Mass., in 2004.

Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn said Wednesday that Novell will now operate as two separate business units under the Novell and SUSE names.

“We are once again establishing Provo as the headquarters of the Novell unit,” said Hawn, with some employees remaining in Massachusetts and other offices…

With deal done, Novell returns to Provo roots

Breaking News, read for yourself at…

Novell Agrees to be Acquired by Attachmate Corporation (Novell)

Attachmate gobbles up Novell for $2.2bn (TheRegister)

What’s Microsoft’s role in the Novell-Attachmate deal? (ZDNET)

Attachmate Corporation to Acquire Novell, Inc. (NetIQ)

Novell Agrees to be Acquired by Attachmate Corporation for $6.10 Per Share in Cash (sunherald.com)

Novell to Be Bought by Attachmate for $2.2 Billion (Bloomberg)

Attachmate agrees to buy Novell for $2.2 bln (reuters.com)

Novell set to be acquired for $2.2 billion while intellectual property asset sale to Microsoft-led consortium set to be pushed through (scmagazineuk.com)

Hedge Fund Forced Novell Buyout…but Didn’t Get Rich (Deal Journal)

Novell To Be Acquired By Privately Held Attachmate For $2.2 Bln (RTT News)

More comment from me when more is known.

Novells share price has dropped back amid reports that finding a buyer willing to pay what it wants for its Netware and Identity & Security products is proving problematic. Novell is apparently not keen to part with its Linux arm to be left with a legacy portfolio.

Whilst I can’t see a future for Netware, Novell does have some excellent products, not least Novell Identity Manager.

We will have to see what happens, even the option of Novell going it alone has not been ruled out. If Novell were to go private I can see real benefits, currently whatever problems it has are compounded by having to pander to shareholders. Novell needs to be able to do ‘the right thing’ rather than being driven purely by quarterly shareholder reports and short-termism.

Novell Slides; Reportedly Has Trouble Finding Buyer For NetWare

Novell shares fall as deal faces setbacks

I’m currently working on contract within the Information Services department at Leeds City Council. My focus is upon support of their Novell Infrastructure, which includes eDirectory, Netware, BorderManager, Zenworks, Storage Manager and Identity Manager. I’m also in the process of relocating to Leeds myself.

I am currently working on contract in Nottingham. I am involved in a number of projects, the most interesting of which recently was implementing Novell Storage Manager. It’s one of those Niche products that you may not have heard of, but it’s absolutely excellent at what it does. Novell Storage Manager is a policy based, event driven, storage management system primarily focused on the automatic provision of user home directories. According to the policies defined NSM can create directories, set trustee rights, set quotas, apply templates and queue directory deletion all according to the settings within the associated policy. A central NSM Action Engine receives details of relevant events from NSM Event Monitors and where an associated NSM policy applies the NSM Engine issues the work to be done to NSM Sentinels. Novell Storage Manager is actually developed by the Condrey Corporation who are also the authors of AuditLogin, a utility that as the name suggests monitors and logs login activity. A new version of Storage Manager is due out anytime now which promises to have much greater support for Linux. Two things that we learned the hard way – DO NOT do partition merges involving partitions with user/group objects linked to your NSM policies without first unloading the NSM event monitors and remember to allow time for these changes to finish synchronsing – my advice is to either switch off the processing of events so they are queues in the engine where you can vet them or start the engine up with the -noprocess command line switch. Another useful switch, this time for the sentinels is -maxcopydir <1-99> which allows you to increase the throughput if you are doing a lot of home directory migrations. I had to create over 300 individual NSM policies in this project! Yes, I’ve learned a thing or two about Storage Manager!

Increasingly I am involved in migrating services off NetWare onto OES Linux. The next big project will involve migrating a NetWare file server cluster to OES Linux by introducing Linux nodes then migrating the NSS volumes across with zero downtime. Although the plan in the long run is to phase out the Novell Client initially NCP services will be used alongside CIFS to facilitate a staged phase out. Implementing CIFS on NetWare is a far simpler process than on OES Linux I have discovered.

I recently implementing NetStorage also, this involves for the un-initiated simplifying the logic and syntax in login scripts and using a reduced command set. NetStorage also cannot handle enormous login scripts so you may find as I did that you need to break it down further. The solution I used was to create a set of profile objects across the various OU’s and break up the large login script into smaller NetStorage versions. Watch out for NetStorage’s strict interpretation of command syntax that you may have got away with in regular login scripts. I then modified the container login scripts so that they used the appropriate script depending upon whether you were logging into NetStorage or not, using the IF =”1″ THEN… condition to detect NetStorage access. I like NetStorage it is now a pretty hardened and robust product. I did hit one major issue though which I am told will be resolved by moving over to running it on OES Linux and that is that is to do with Storage Location Objects. If you create an SLO that points to a CIFS share rather than an NCP location it doesn’t work, I have been assured that this functionality works as designed on OES Linux.

Recent experience running eDirectory and iDentity Manager on SUSE Linux has only served to reinforce what a stable and fast platform SUSE Linux is. Also on the cards is an upgrade from eDirectory 8.7.3.x to 8.8.2. We got our fingers burnt by the eDirectory 8.7.3 sp10 support pack which introduced ghostly intermittant -608 errors, Novell rushed out a fix called 10a but that has now also been withdrawn and we are left in limbo a bit. Just waiting to hear whether the best cause of action will be to roll forward to 8.8.2 or back-rev to 8.7.3.9.

Recently been introduced to the benefits of JRB Utils and NDS Magic which I will add links for to the resources page on my website when I get the chance

In July I attended an intensive 4 day course, it was a Novell advanced technical training course run by Salford Software. A product expert flew in from Dusseldorf in order to deliver the course in Manchester. The other delegates included a team from ITV and a team from the Turkish government, based in Istanbul. We learned how to integrate and automate different systems using a product called Novell iDentity Manager. By integrating systems and automating processes so that entirely different systems work together seamlessly cuts down on duplication and automates processes that might otherwise be done manually. An example might be for example a new employee joining an organisation – the organisation will need to enter and maintain details about that employee on a number of different systems such as payroll and administration and the user may need accounts on various systems – getting all of that setup is time consuming and involves duplication. Using iDentity Manager it is possible to link these systems together and automate the processes so that the information need only be entered once and the necessary accounts are created automatically and perhaps emails generated to the appropriate people. This is just a very simple example but demonstrates the advantages. Entire business processes can be automated in this way and systems which are currently entirely seperate can be linked together. The skills gained on this course should prove very useful in the future in integrating and automating systems/processes. Identity Manager is an incredible product that I hope to work with more heavily in the future. Provided you have a good technical foundation I highly recommend you try a Novell ATT course.