The SCO Group's recently released OpenServer 6 leverages updates to a newly minted Unix System V Release 5 kernel, performs reasonably well in the 32-bit realm and supports new security features. However, SCO needs to take some time to smooth out some functionality details.

OpenServer contrasts with SCO's UnixWare (see test here ) in that its memory requirements and CPU support are more akin to the needs of small and midsize businesses. We found it odd that OpenServer 6 is priced by the number of users, actual CPUs and memory, instead of the industry standard per-user or per-CPU core(s) model.

OpenServer 6 exhibited no difficulty in identifying the hardware on any of the server platforms we used for testing. There is no specific provision for 64-bit processors, but OpenServer 6 found and used our dual and multi-CPU 64-bit machines, tapping those processors via x86/32-bit emulation. USB printers aren't correctly supported, but SCO says it is addressing that issue. Not fully supporting a pxE boot or other network installation in this version of the operating system is a shortcoming.

User administration initially struck fear into us, as we found that a user can be created with any password length above three characters. Subsequently, we found that when users change their passwords, those selections can be highly constrained through the SCO Security Profile Manager utility to suit high standards for password dictionary attack prevention that the underlying SVR5 supports. OpenServer 6 lets administrators force passwords with added characters, numbers and randomness.

The only real change to the standard open source bundle (which typically comprises Apache, Tomcat, Java, Java Server Pages, Mozilla, SAMBA, PostGreSQL and MySQL) included with OpenServer 6 is that Apache 2.0.3 is installed to serve up help files that are HTML representations of actual Open Server 6 system documents. This annoying implementation, however, has "localhost" references that tie the use of these HTML files to those browsing the documents on the host only, therefore there is no remote administrative access to them. The documents also incorrectly describe how to get SCO's DocView, a help/file viewer, to work.