Happy Anniversary Netware

[cpjitservices]

How the clammy claws of Novell NetWare were torn off today's networks ? The Register

 

Happy Anniversary!

[AJWhite1970]

Takes me back to the good old days when I was a MCNE and used to be flown out to Utah and San Jose at Novell's expense to attend Brainshare and NDA events...

 

Used to have 30 servers over 7 sites running Netware 5, 6.0 and 6.5, rock solid OS, hardly ever gave me any problems. Servers used to be up for years without being touched etc

 

[cpjitservices]

Good Times!!!!

 

 

 

Takes me back to the good old days when I was a MCNE and used to be flown out to Utah and San Jose at Novell's expense to attend Brainshare and NDA events...

 

Used to have 30 servers over 7 sites running Netware 5, 6.0 and 6.5, rock solid OS, hardly ever gave me any problems. Servers used to be up for years without being touched etc

 

[twin--turbo]

I was just thinking about Novell today, wondering if I could recall the main commands of netware if needed.

 

it's 18 months since our last Netware box went off, a groupwise 8 server.

 

I hate Exchange.

 

Rob

[AJWhite1970]

Off the top of my head:-

DSRepair

DSMerge

Config

DSTrace

NWConfig

VRepair

TCPCon

 

Plus NWAdmin32 and ConSLOW1 for the admin and Client32 on the Win95 workstations

 

I agree Groupwise was a great product especially combined with Novell Instant Messenger, and also BorderManager as the firewall

 

Still got several of the t-shirts, jumpers, laptop cases, suitcase from back in the day when companies had bottomless corporate entertainment budgets

Edited July 16, 2013 by AJWhite1970

[twin--turbo]

nssmu

timesync (restart or reset)

down

inetcfg

 

 

Dam I wana build one up again for fun...

[teejay]

Another one who cut their teeth with Netware, brilliant server OS and Windows Server still hasn't caught up in some areas. Hmm, will have to visit the loft to see if I've still got the disks

[DMcCoy]

Anyone who still likes Netware didn't use 6.0 at release.

[kearton]

My fav old Netware command:

DISABLE LOGIN

[twin--turbo]

Anyone who still likes Netware didn't use 6.0 at release.

 

 

 

I used 4.x 5, 6 and 6.5 don't remember any major problems.

 

 

Had mixed Netware and OES2 Linux boxes in the end.

 

Rob

Edited July 17, 2013 by twin--turbo

[AJWhite1970]

Netware 6.0 worked (apart from the awful ds.nlm that shipped with it that tore holes in NDS if your timesync was off and the NSS module that made a mess of traditional file stores if you ran NSSMU on an existing volume....) but when Netware 6.5 was released it was a much more feature rich product, and I'm still aware of a couple of small businesses to this day that are happily running NW65SP8

[cpjitservices]

The only version I have managed to play with was 6.5, it was fantastic! Miles ahead of Windows Server. Never played with OES2 but wouldn't mind seeing what it can do.

 

Sadly, everyone I know who ran Novell have now gone fully Windows.

 

 

Netware 6.0 worked (apart from the awful ds.nlm that shipped with it that tore holes in NDS if your timesync was off and the NSS module that made a mess of traditional file stores if you ran NSSMU on an existing volume....) but when Netware 6.5 was released it was a much more feature rich product, and I'm still aware of a couple of small businesses to this day that are happily running NW65SP8

[twin--turbo]

Netware 6.0 worked (apart from the awful ds.nlm that shipped with it that tore holes in NDS if your timesync was off and the NSS module that made a mess of traditional file stores if you ran NSSMU on an existing volume....) but when Netware 6.5 was released it was a much more feature rich product, and I'm still aware of a couple of small businesses to this day that are happily running NW65SP8

 

I have a vauge recolection of something, but we probably were on SP2 or SP3 within hours of installign 6.0...

 

I do remember beign very annoyed to find our DLT7000 tapes despite being the same tape as DLT-VS80 wer formatted differently so we could not directly restoer the backup of our NW5 server to the new NW6 server... The file copy took hours.

 

 

We still miss Zenworks

 

Rob

[AJWhite1970]

I fully gave in to the dark side four years ago when I took this job after finishing migrating a large site from Netware to Windows. To this day I still miss Zenworks for workstation management, GPP on steroids...

[AJWhite1970]

I do remember being very annoyed to find our DLT7000 tapes despite being the same tape as DLT-VS80 wer formatted differently so we could not directly restoer the backup of our NW5 server to the new NW6 server... The file copy took hours.

 

Brings back memories, there must have been about 7 different versions of ULTRIUM.NLM, each as incompatible with each other as chalk and elephants....

[twin--turbo]

I am installing a VM as we speak

 

it's named the same as the first 5.0 Server I built in 1999...

 

Rob

[twin--turbo]

The original was a Dell Poweredge 2300, Single P2, 3 18GB Scis's in Raid 5 , 256MB of ram... Edited July 17, 2013 by twin--turbo

[cpjitservices]

Zenworks is the absolute boss, there is NOTHING you couldnt do/manage with Zenworks... App management was great!!!

[cpjitservices]

We had quite the farm of Netwrae 6 servers spread over 8 different sites 4-5 servers at each site - They were definitely Dell servers not sure on which model and we used HP for storage.

 

TBH - I do miss Console One, and the Novell Login client was good too. I liked being able to login to a restricted account (if a user needed something installing locally) and then bringing up the login box whilst still logged into that users account and login to mine over the top and have full admin rights, then just detach my account and viola program installed user can get on with whatever they needed to do.

 

The uptimes on the servers were good, we had 6 years on one of them!

[twin--turbo]

It's done...

 

 

Built

Logged on with my old PC ( Virtualised 2.5 years ago )

Setup my old login account in C1

 

Sorted...

 

Rob

[twin--turbo]

got rconj runnign now

 

I wana build a full network up again on Netware..

[AJWhite1970]

DISPLAY SERVERS

[DMcCoy]

All you need now is some NSS file corruption, due to the bug with missing compression headers, 50,000 missing files and a print server NLM that abends every 10 minutes when printing to a Castelle LANpress.

 

5.1 was great.

[cpjitservices]

I have the images still for Netware but dont know about the license file thats needed upon install. I may of lost that.

[evil-tom]

Still use it in production along with OES 11. I started with NetWare 2.10 via 3.11 and so on. It beats the hell out of Windows. It's happy with hundreds of connections at a time and saves money on hardware too. Mix it with Zenworks and users are happy. Thousands of users and workstations; clustering and uptime brilliant.

No need to migrate.

Tom