[HN Gopher] 1989 Networking: NetWare 386
___________________________________________________________________
1989 Networking: NetWare 386
Author : supermatou
Score : 96 points
Date : 2024-07-20 12:51 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.os2museum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.os2museum.com)
| jasoneckert wrote:
| NetWare proliferated very rapidly during the late 80s and was
| common on most networks I used into the mid 1990s. Their file
| server product was stable and easy to configure, and worked very
| well with nearly every client out there using the fast IPX/SPX
| protocol.
|
| However, by the mid 1990s it was clear that Windows NT and the
| TCP/IP protocol of the Internet would soon make Novell and
| NetWare fade into the sunset.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Netware 4 I think was dubbed "intranetware" and had some form
| of IP support. We had netware at school in about 93-96 with
| windows 3.1 running on diskless clients. Netwars was a key
| component of this.
|
| I think Windows 95 and "intranetware 4" came in either summer
| 96 or summer 97. By 98 or 99 we had some ISDN internet
| connectivity, I assume via a proxy running on the netware
| server. Internet access was still ISDN based when I left in
| summer 2000.
| efitz wrote:
| I was excited when I upgraded my NetWare 3.11 servers to
| NetWare 4, installed the TCP/IP update, and went to enable
| it.
|
| Then, I saw the UX. You had to configure IP addresses as
| dotted HEX quads. It was pretty obvious that someone at
| Novell fundamentally didn't get it.
| linker3000 wrote:
| I don't remember that. I do remember that with 2.12 and
| 2.15 I occasionally had to use a hex editor on disk drive-
| related files to make the drives work with certain
| hardware.
|
| I also recall having to key-in hard drive defect tables as
| part of the install.
| hougaard wrote:
| What warez dump?
| peppermint_gum wrote:
| I'm also interested in learning about it. I've only found this
| thread on Twitter:
| https://x.com/virtuallyfun/status/1804913568820699549
|
| Apparently there are all kinds of goodies in that dump, like
| previously unknown betas of MS-DOS and OS/2, but there are no
| links to the dump itself. It's a shame that the community is so
| secretive about this :(
| ndiddy wrote:
| Someone got access to the full tape backups for two warez BBSes
| (The WaREZ HouZE and Piper's Pit) and uploaded the tape images
| to archive.org: https://archive.org/details/ibm-wgam-wbiz-
| collection. The collection spans the late 1980s to the late
| 1990s.
| mccrory wrote:
| MCNE/MCSE here from the mid-90's, agree it was obvious that
| Netware would likely fade. Windows NT 3.51 (even though it wasn't
| as good at the time), was more user friendly and had the Windows
| interface, compatibility, etc etc However, it NT wasn't remotely
| as stable as Netware at that time either. Then we got to watch as
| Novell slowly went insane competing and buying WordPerfect and
| doing all sorts of other crazy moves. I still wish that Novell
| had taken all of its money and bought VMware when they were just
| working on GSX/ESX (now vSphere). This would have changed the
| trajectory of both Novell and the market.
| Angostura wrote:
| In addition, from what I vaguely recall, one of the big selling
| point of NT LAN Manager was the ability to deploy network
| server applications on the server.
|
| Novell responded with Netware Loadable Modules, but they
| weren't as versatile and needed specialised knowledge/tools.
| linsomniac wrote:
| The software I was working on in the late '80s made use of
| Btrieve, a ISAM database server running on Netware. IIRC
| there was also a SQL server of some sort that we used with
| it, mostly for reporting.
| craz8 wrote:
| I used Btrieve a lot in several jobs in the UK in the late
| 80s and early 90s. It was fast and easy to work with,
| mostly
|
| I used the stand alone version, not the later NLM on the
| server
| flomo wrote:
| Yep, Netware ran entirely in Ring 0. In linux terminology it
| was a kernel with no user space, and NLMs were kernel
| modules. Very fast for file serving, but any application
| could crash the system. Stability was largely a result of
| lots of updates. NT had userspace, protected memory, etc, and
| a GUI for setting up TCP/IP.
| Sesse__ wrote:
| In NetWare 4.x (and even more so in 5.x), you could give
| NLMs their own address space. But by then, it was probably
| lost anyway.
| skissane wrote:
| Around 2006/2007, I was playing around with NetWare 6.5
| at work. We had heaps of it but lots of talk about
| replacing NetWare/eDir/GroupWise with Windows/AD/Exchange
| (which I think finally did happen after I left the
| place). My recollection was it was quite unstable -
| because, having come from Linux, I was playing with bash
| and SSH. bash would crash a lot (something that very
| rarely happens on Linux) but it wouldn't bring down the
| whole server (which was a dev/test NetWare server
| anyway). I don't remember what exactly I was trying to
| do: I had some work-related justification, which I forget
| now - something something identity management - but my
| real reason was just to explore the system. The
| instability of it convinced me to not take any ideas I
| had any further.
| surfingdino wrote:
| > NT had userspace, protected memory, etc, and a GUI for
| setting up TCP/IP.
|
| That's because Microsoft hired Dave Cutler who previously
| worked on VMS and knew what he was doing. Microsoft even
| had their own Unix, but didn't know what to do with it.
| flomo wrote:
| The issue with UNIX on PCs was the $1000 or whatever
| licensing cost.
|
| Just as some trivia, Novell bought UNIX System V R4 from
| AT&T and planned to merge it with Netware to create
| "SuperNOS", which would have been a direct competitor to
| NT. But they never got it out the door and spun-off UNIX
| to (old) SCO.
| sllabres wrote:
| Microsoft Xenix (never knew more about it than the name).
|
| For small to medium sized businesses Netware had the
| advantage that with IPX networking there was nearly no
| configuration necessary. No subnetting, assigning of IP
| addresses to clients or running DHCP services.
|
| The availability of software on the server was limited (i
| remember backup services, licensing software). But for
| central file service and printing it was rock solid, even
| in a bit larger (for the time, around 1995) environments
| without any issues. (IRC >200 clients on a single 486 CPU
| and 4 MB RAM)
| bitwize wrote:
| > Microsoft Xenix (never knew more about it than the
| name).
|
| For a year or two there, the only other commercial Unix
| workstation not made by Sun could be had from Radio
| Shack: the TRS-80 Model 16 running Xenix. Enough small
| businesses ran Xenix, with up to 3 simultaneous users on
| a single stock machine (console + 2 terminals) that Radio
| Shack kept supporting these things until the late 1980s;
| with up to an 8 MHz CPU, up to 7 MiB of RAM, and an
| actual (external) MMU, the Model 16 could handle more
| workload, theoretically more stably than an x86 machine
| running Xenix until about the time Xenix/386 came out.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| > Netware ran entirely in Ring 0
|
| NetWare was TempleOS with networking...
| freeopinion wrote:
| Netware existed and thrived before NT LAN Manager. NT LAN
| Manager seemed like the one MS product that couldn't make
| inroads against established competition. It simply wasn't
| as good as Netware.
|
| The way I remember it NLMs were pretty stable. Anything on
| Windows was not stable, userspace or otherwise. Netware's
| TUI was just as good as NT's GUI for what it needed to do.
| It wasn't a liability. Netware's superior directory service
| was more important.
|
| Netware's demise was the transition from IPX to TCIP/IP and
| the explosion of the WWW. And from my perspective it wasn't
| really NT that knocked Netware down. It was Linux and
| Solaris. Novell kinda saw that coming and tried to figure
| out a future with SuSE. They just never got the combination
| of their directory server with Linux right in time.
| Microsoft stumbled around for some years, but they got
| their directory services figured out before Novell got
| their OS story straight in the new world.
| flomo wrote:
| Windows NT Server pretty much stomped Netware, so you
| seem very confused. Are you thinking of OS/2 LAN Manager?
|
| NetWare was stable running vanilla file/print services
| (just don't load the AppleTalk module!), not so good with
| database services and so on.
| mjcl wrote:
| > The way I remember it NLMs were pretty stable.
|
| I think this depends on what NLMs you were running. An
| old job had a NetWare 3.12 server running
| btrieve/pervasive and it ABENDed enough that I learned
| how to use the debugger to get the console back and
| dismount volumes to avoid triggering VREPAIR on restart.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| NT 3.51 was rock solid, I had it on my desk and it never
| crashed once during the ~year I ran it. Which was a huge deal
| for MS in those days. Of course they chose performance over
| stability in 4.x moving display drivers in to the kernel.
| Thankfully it didn't affect servers much since they could be
| run on vga/svga drivers.
| genewitch wrote:
| i ran NT4 from right before 98 until about a year into
| win2k's release cycle. I remember it never crashing, i think
| power outages were the only thing that ruined my uptime
| during those years. I had XP for a little while after win2k
| because of directx, but as soon as x64 released i was on
| that, and then 7 x64. My timeline for windows left me
| moderately happy with my own experience - but i did a lot of
| "repair" for 95-vista for friends, family, customers, and
| businesses.
|
| Windows Millennium Edition, everyone!
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Stability was heavily dependent on your display card and
| driver >= 4.0 until the recent past. It could be fine or
| horrible depending on how well the manufacturer did their
| job.
|
| My memory is that 3.X could restart graphics if a crash
| happened there.
| genewitch wrote:
| could be, i never used 3.51
| nradov wrote:
| Besides the technical and functional weaknesses of NetWare,
| Novell also shot themselves in the foot by making the product
| hard to buy. As an end customer you generally couldn't buy it
| directly. Instead you had to go through an authorized reseller
| who would try to upsell you on a bunch of hardware and
| services. That made some sense in the early days of PC LANs
| when you had to plug hardware jumpers into network cards to
| configure interrupts but by the time Windows NT launched it was
| just stupid. Microsoft made NT easy and hassle free for anyone
| with money to buy and install, which tremendously accelerated
| early adoption.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Reading this I was amazed that the cheapskate place I worked
| ~89-92 shelled out to get us a Netware server, considering the
| crappy hardware they had us developers working on. But then I
| just realized that we were probably running on a pirated copy.
|
| The company was a PC builder that wanted to get into software,
| but they also did some services work like installing Netware.
| They were a fairly sizable local operation until one day when
| they won a large bid for computers for the local University by
| bidding based on a projected continuing drop in components, and
| then an unexpected supply problem pushed prices significantly up.
| This was after I left the company, but they seemed to go bankrupt
| basically overnight.
| pixl97 wrote:
| It was insanely common for those PC builders to be fly by night
| operations steeped in pirating everything they could get a hold
| of. It wasn't hard for some random people with a little bit of
| computer skill to get into it.
| efitz wrote:
| Oh man this brings back bad memories- I had forgotten about the
| Bindery. I was a CNE (3.X) back in the day.
| linker3000 wrote:
| I was a freelance trainer and specialised in NetWare and
| networking at the time. I was very busy (UK) working for the
| likes of Barefoot computer training (Aris), Skytech, Azlan,
| Comtec, Expertise, QA and others.
|
| I was also a systems and networking installer.
|
| Some training companies insisted that their trainers were
| 'Novell Certified' - and indeed I was, because to purchase,
| install and get support directly from Novell, your organisation
| (in my case, my own company with me as sole employee) you had
| to have one person qualified as a Certified Netware Salesperson
| (I think that's what they called it), so I paid for and passed
| that exam. I never bothered with CNA, CNE or ECNE, although I
| did write official material for them.
|
| That reminds me - I also wrote some of the original CompTIA A+
| Service Technician training material, and ended up delivering
| it and running train the trainer courses around the world.
|
| Again, one company asked me whether I was A+ Service Technician
| certified, and I said I wasn't, so to deliver training for
| them, I registered, popped into their exam room and took the
| cert during a morning break in training. Happy to say I passed
| - helped somewhat by the fact that I wrote some of the exam
| questions!
| linker3000 wrote:
| I was a systems engineer and also taught NetWare admin classes. I
| also worked with Novell to update their training material.
|
| I remember the first release of NetWare 386 very well; it was a
| breeze to install, but the early version had a bug and if you
| unplugged the 10Base2 coax from the server it would crash.
| Apparently, the routine to display a warning message on the
| console had an issue. Novell issued a patch NLM.
|
| I had one site that experienced random crashes, but it was not
| the aforementioned bug. Long story short: After about two months
| of sleuthing, working with Novell and Compaq, camping on site and
| driving to/from the office to site (about 2hr each way), I found
| that it was a mains spike caused by a dishwasher right up against
| the server room wall in the next room.
|
| The fix was to move the Compaq server, which was actually a large
| desktop model, on its table to the opposite end of the server
| room.
| stevekemp wrote:
| I remember working in random IT companies, back in the early
| nineties, where our "servers" were a collection of random
| desktop machines running Linux.
|
| At the time I think we had one Sun E450, and 20-30 random
| desktop hosts. All headless, except for keyboards connected. We
| also had a bunch of phone lines and external modems, which were
| used to run UUCP jobs overnight, or transfer files other ways,
| to remote SCO Unixware hosts.
|
| It was only later that I worked with "proper" servers, with
| niceties such as remote access, redundant power-supplies, and
| maybe even multiple hard drives (!)
| qingcharles wrote:
| Ugh. I hate "bugs" like that. I worked in PC repair while at
| college. I remember one customer with a mouse where the right-
| button wouldn't work. I replaced the mouse, RAM, HDD + OS, mobo
| + CPU before I tried another PSU. Literally everything worked
| perfectly except that mouse button.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Ah, NetWare! Those were the days...though my memories are mostly
| of the prior (286) version.
|
| _After_ you got it working right, NetWare was rock-solid. Though
| if you weren 't seriously experienced with NetWare, the "got it
| working right" could be difficult to distinguish from "went
| through Hell".
|
| But once MS's OS's grew up enough to cope with running a serious
| fileserver, NetWare was doomed. Didn't matter that MS OS's were
| pretty mediocre. Their business strategy was good and ruthless,
| they had vastly more money, NetWare was a lone-niche product, and
| Novell wasn't very good at either business strategy, nor bigger-
| picture technical management.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I got my CNA in about '92. Really helped land my first full time
| job.
| pajko wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/Hacker_Chronicles_Volume_1_1994
|
| The kock.exe turned every account into administrators. Guess who
| was caught using it in secondary school :)
| dura00 wrote:
| And lets remember the best feature of NetWare: ncsnipes.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Netwars game was my favorite, then syscon? and filer/salvage.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 3Com, where I was, got suckered by Microsoft into "collaborating"
| on Lan Manager and NetBIOS. That was called internally "Viet
| BIOS."
|
| This led directly to the engineers' slogan:
|
| _" Strategic" means "you don't make any money"_
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Netware was awesome and I remember it fondly. Was quite
| productive to use and admin.
|
| However an expensive niche fileserver OS--which made a lot of
| sense in the 80s--was simply not needed any longer as hardware,
| storage, and OS commoditization happened over the next twenty
| years. Moore's law was not kind to it.
|
| Novell got hit in the head by NT and the internet, and below the
| belt by Linux, and went down for the count. Was sad the day I
| removed it from my resume.
| sillywalk wrote:
| $7,995. Wow. I wonder how much a contemporary Unix license cost.
| qingcharles wrote:
| That's $20,256 in your 2024 dollars.
| re5i5tor wrote:
| Eric Schmidt was running Novell 1997-2001, when things went all
| the way down the tubes. I was shocked when Google hired him.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| A big cultural outcome of Netware was the shear volume of highly
| compatible Novell network cards that flooded the market. Novell
| charged a fortune for Netware licenses but their hardware was
| cheap. Especially when corporations upgraded and there was
| suddenly 1000 NE2000 cards for $2 each at the local swap meet.
|
| Imho the entire LAN culture of the 90's was enabled by being able
| to join in for the cost of a coffee and people would often have a
| few spare cards for those that showed up to the party without
| one.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Half the mid-90s Internet was probably running off NE2000s.
| Definitely the majority of Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD servers
| connected to the Net.
| lukeh wrote:
| Also a good read:
|
| https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-novell
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Two Netware memories: FIRE PHASERS[0] and the screen saver on the
| server that showed processor load as a "snake" (and one snake per
| processor) with length relative to load.
|
| [0]
| http://www.novell.com/documentation/ncl_sle_11/login/data/h5...
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Hard to grasp now but Netware was really exciting technology at
| the time.
|
| It was also arguably the most advanced server on the Intel
| platform.
|
| There was a moment in time when it looked like Novell might
| become THE corporate back end server technology and all sorts of
| servers were built to run on Netware. I think there was Oracle
| and Lotus Notes and CC Mail and some others
|
| However, Novell for whatever reason simply didn't make Netware
| robust. Netware needed to be memory protected and have task
| preemption and it did neither, making it unsuitable as a server.
| Why they refused to do this is unclear. I seem to recall reading
| that Drew Major didn't have the technical chops to make it
| happen. I also recall reading that Drew Major believed that task
| preemption and memory protection were slow, and that speed was
| more important.
|
| Also, Netware was late to the party with TCP/IP support - they
| were all in on IPX/SPX and in the end TCP won the entire protocol
| game, sending IPX/SPX, XNS and other common network protocols to
| the dustbin.
|
| Anyhow Microsoft came along with Windows NT and OS/2 and stomped
| on Novell and since Netware wasn't up to the job, the show was
| over.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-07-20 23:04 UTC)