Timothy
Parker Consulting Incorporated
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FacetWin 3 We’ve looked at Facet Corp’s FacetWin several times
before in First Looks. The latest
release, FacetWin 3, adds a bunch of new features to this already excellent
package and makes a worthy upgrade for existing users. For those unfamiliar with
the software, FacetWin 3 is designed to provide Windows to UNIX integration by
offering Windows clients for most user services demanded from a UNIX server.
There are transparent file transfers, allowing files to be easily moved
back and forth from Windows to UNIX and vice versa.
There’s a print facility that lets UNIX print on your Windows printer,
and Windows print on a UNIX printer, all with no extra effort on the user’s
part. There’s a terminal
emulation system for character terminals (no X client). There’s a POP3 e-mail
server that can integrate Outlook and other popular Windows e-mail clients with
a UNIX server. And there’s
resource sharing, making UNIX and Windows resources all look the same under
Windows Explorer. FacetWin has been
doing all these tricks for a while, so for FacetWin 3, FacetCorp added several
new tricks. The most important of the new FacetWin 3 additions is
probably the Internet Modem Server ability.
The Internet Modem Server (IMS hereafter) allows a bunch of Windows
clients to share a bank of modems attached to a UNIX server.
The modems are fully accessible as a gateway out to the Internet, for
World Wide Web browsing, e-mail, FTP, and any other service the Windows users
could want. IMS is an important
addition for many companies because it provides two important benefits.
First, it eliminates the need to install modems and telephone lines in
each Windows client. Second, it
allows for better use of existing modem banks used by remote access servers,
dial-in or dial-out modems, and fax devices already connected to the UNIX
server. The installation and
configuration of IMS on each Windows client is simple, taking only a minute or
two, and after configuring the Windows system, a user on that system isn’t
aware of the connection to the UNIX modem bank, simply accessing the Internet as
if it was attached to the Windows machine.
Obviously, throughput is going to depend on the number of modems and
number of users. The second feature we were impressed with in FacetWin 3 is
a PC Backup and Restore capability. The Backup and Restore utility lets an
Windows user, or the UNIX system administrator, back up and restore Windows
filesystem files on UNIX backup devices. All
the usual bells and whistles are included, such as incremental backups,
compression, and multiple volume backups. Even better, a backup can be to multiple devices with mixed
media, and a backup can be set for several Windows machines in one operation.
The procedure for backing up is simplified through an Explorer-like
interface. We tested FacetWin 3 on a network with both UnixWare and
OpenServer servers, as well as HP-UX 10.2 and Solaris 2.7
servers. We installed
FacetWin 3 on twelve Windows clients. All
the basic FacetWin features such as file transfers and terminal emulation are
similar to the previous releases, so we concentrated on the two important new
additions to FacetWin 3. We
configured the Internet Modem Server package by allocating a bank of four 56kbps
modems all connected to an ISP using MPPP (Multilink Point-to-Point Protocol)
through the UnixWare server. All
twelve Windows clients could easily access the modem bank transparently, just as
they would a dedicated gateway connection to the Internet.
Although traffic took a hit when all twelve clients were downloading Web
sites, adding more modems, or faster access methods would easily solve this.
The test IMS with faster modem lines, we used two Comtrol ISDN routers
and configured eight ISDN connections (1.024Mbps).
Again, IMS easily used the modem bank, controlled by the OpenServer
system, and all twelve Windows clients behaved perfectly. To test the PC Backup and Restore system, we used a Sony
AIT drive on the OpenServer system and an HP DLT drive on the UnixWare server,
and individually performed backups of the clients to each drive.
The backups and restores worked perfectly, as expected. As an
administrator, we then configured the twelve Windows clients to back up their
entire filesystems in turn, every night to one of the two drives.
Every morning we had a tape with a complete network backup, which is an
ideal situation for administrators. With Windows 2000 coming soon, we tested FacetWin 3 under
that operating system. The entire
suite of tools worked perfectly, just as they do under Windows 98, with the
exception of Internet Modem Server. Since
this feature doesn’t work under Windows NT 4.0 either, there must be some
conflict that Facet is still trying to resolve.
All the other features of FacetWin 3, both the new additions to version 3
and the basic UNIX-Windows connectivity tools, all functioned without pause. Configuring a UNIX application under Windows is easy with
the Control Panel applet installed with FacetWin 3. Using the applet, we configured most applications in less
than a minute. Since the disk
requirements for FacetWin 3 are benign (about 5MB) there’s no reason not to
deploy on all Windows machines on a network.
There’s no conflicts with NFS, either, because FacetWin 3 uses CFIP
(Common Internet File System). CFIP and SMB (Server Message Block) provide the
same functionality as NFS but are native to Windows and don’t require servers. Is FacetWin 3 worth the upgrade? If you need modem sharing or Windows to UNIX backups,
definitely spend the money. The
package would be worth its cost for these two features alone, but getting the
rest of the FacetWin toolset thrown in is a bonus. FacetWin 3 $95 Summary: Two excellent new features show you can teach an old dog new tricks. FacetWin 3 continues to be the best Windows to UNIX compatibility tool on the market. |
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