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Replication may sound sexy over a candlelit dinner and a glass of wine, but it's hardly a headline-grabber in the IT world. Losing public mind share to services such as thin clients, the ability to synchronize files between WANconnected sites, while highly desirable in the larger enterprise, is ho-hum to managers of smaller networks. Disrespected and misunderstood by the masses, automated file-replication services are nonetheless a blessing to those managers with numerous servers, files and questionable wide-area links.
I tested Novell's most recent beta of its replication services, Novell Replication Services (NRS) 1.21, in our Savannah, Ga., lab and found that it offers a just-likemom-used-to-make serving of automated file updates to multiple servers. But unlike homegrown file-copy scripts and other simplistic file-mirroring schemes, NRS is sophisticated enough to offer one- or two-way replication and include/exclude hierarchy, and support compression. It can link servers so that one server on one side of a WAN connection can update others, and it can deal with file clashes from different servers simultaneously updating different copies of a file.
Unfortunately, though NRS supports a NetWare network populated with Windows95 and NT PCs well, it cannot handle Macintosh or Unix file attributes nor replicate with non-NetWare servers. NRS...