Definitely would be interested in seeing the diskless Win95 installation. I'm impressed with the sheer amount of research you must have done to make this work and the obscure old help pages you must have had to hunt down.

We supported a high school that had 5 classrooms of diskless PCs that booted from a Novell Server into DOS 5 and Windows 3.1. The problem was that these calls rooms were wired using 10BaseT cabling to rack mounted Ethernet hubs. So basically you had 100 - 125 computers all trying to load disk images at once, I was able to improve the situation by adding two additional Ethernet cards in the server and splitting the single network into three networks. The real fix was an affordable 24-port 10BaseT network switch replacing one of the hubs. That classroom worked beautifully. I think the sell price was around $2,000 in 1995. They ended up getting three or four of of them.

Oh man, diskless Windows 95 sounds awesome! I'd love to see that.

Diskless W95!!

I appreciate the time that goes into the prep and presentation of your projects. Now I have a video to refer people to when they ask me how to set up netware :)

How I don't miss dual scan screens. Thanks for the throwback, I had no idea this was possible via DOS but I do this routinely with my steam library over network now, works great!

I'm not sure if you came across it in your research, but this sounds similar to what the IBM PS/2's ran in my elementary school--I'm pretty sure they were using NetWare of sorts, but there was some kind of non-DOS interface. You'd see an IBM splash screen, hit enter and get a login screen with ASCII art. You'd log in and get some kind of menu to select software and I remember the teacher's menu had a red background. As far as I recall the machines did not have hard drives--the server went down when I was in 5th grade so I did what I could with a DOS boot disk. By the end of the year they were putting in 486's with Win 3.1, which in hindsight was outdated for even for 1997.

Had missed this one. Neat, and a big yes on that Win95 attempt!

Back in the day, I made a Win 3.1 floppy. I stripped it down to the bare minimum to have the UI working and I managed to fit it on a single disk - 1.44MB, of course. Simple DOS 6.22 boot + Win 3.1 was great on a floppy. :) Admittedly, it was mostly a toy demo, as my working one was bootable MS-DOS 6.22 with himem, scandisk, chkdsk, defrag and a few other essentials, plus Volkov Commander (~90KB). I also had plenty of free space left on the floppy, for... stuff. Now I'll check if you ended up making the diskless Win95 installation. :)) Yup, very late to the party but still having fun. Thanks for taking time to open this time capsule! :)

Excellent work my friend. Loads of memories of Netware from 2.0 through 3.11, it really was very robust once it had been setup. I can remember pulling a Netware 3.11 server out that had been running constantly for over 6 years and only because the fans were screaming.

very interesting, enjoyed watching this. thank you for sharing.

Very informative and nicely made!

So many fond memories. You did an amazing job! Subscribed!!!!

This takes me back to when I was an assistant to the head of the computer department in high school from 1995-1998 I had to make these discs so I made one that would boot in any room to the server and load the printer for that classroom and connect to the internet and then load either ethernet, baseband or token ring depending on the room you were in.

2001: A Space Odyssey! love it.

I recall seeing a Windows 3.1 PC running its system files over a Novell network at a prior job. It would always freeze up with some error every night though, possibly from a lost network connection, so it had to be rebooted every night. On a side note, this is the 486th like, just to be period-appropriate.

Oh man this brought back memories of seeing library computers boot into Novell...

I remember running office 6 on windows 3.11 from a network drive om 3 pcs at home using netware lite. This is a blast from the past. Also had fun playing netwars.

Something I remembered being told, while rewatching this one for the n-th time: A friend of mine who's a civil engineer used to work for a very, shall we say, "traditional" European construction company and they only switched away from what little was left of Lotus products in 2018. And probably only because they couldn't renew the contract for it with IBM.

Hi, where did you download the AMD PCNet RPL boot ROM pls? I cannot find it anywhere... And yes, windows 95 via RPL would be awesome to see booting. Thank you for what you do man!

Thank you very much. I dabbled with using bootp for diskless Linux 20 years ago.

The Community College I went to/worked at had one campus where all the computer lab machines were diskless. Students paid $10-$15 or so for a floppy with some files on it. All client systems did an RPL load off the 3.11/3.12 systems. Students data was saved on the floppy from WP, and other apps. Windows 3.11 was the normal environment and the end user windows custom settings were saved on the floppy. At my campus we ran OS/2 and Windows but gave students 10-20MB for their data. As a student worker I did setup OS/2 Warp Server Advanced and it shared out the Novell 3.11 mounts so the OS/2 systems did not need to run the Netware stack. Once Windows 95 came out the diskless campus was in a bind as they needed to but a few hundred hard drives and figure out how to manage it. We were better off.

This is pretty much my first experience with PC networking. I did a course at our local polytechnic and they had 386 computers that booted from the network cards into Netware 3.1, this was around 1994 to 1995. After login you would be presented with a DOS menu where you could load several DOS applications and Windows 3.1. In my 1995 my high school also upgraded it's aging computer network of BBC Micro computers that used Econet to a PC based network running Netware 4. The school network had 486 computers with 250MB hard drives which weren't really even used, these computers booted into DOS and then connected to the Netware server where we ran a shared copy of Windows 3.11 as you have shown in this video. We did start adding Windows 95 computers which logged into Netware around 1997 and when I left school in 1998 and did a full computer course at our local polytechnic the polytech had now upgraded their computers to Windows NT 4.0 which still used Netware 4. The same year as part of my course I learnt how to run a Netware network as you have shown here. I never got to use any Netware working in the industry as by this time everyone had moved over to Windows NT and Active Directory.

yup, we ran our computers at school with this system on 486's back in the '90s; i even still have a network card lying around with an OPROM for netware, and that network card is both ethernet as thinnet (thin-coax), i also have some coax cable lying around and even some terminators :). I believe it was limited to 12mbit on coax

My high school had a set up like this. 386 workstations, token ring network. Many hours spent learning to program in Borland Turbo Pascal on those machines.

"Map Root" i loved it.

The setup at my dad's job in early 90's consisted of a 386 Novell server (in a server tower case, ofc) and 5 diskless 286 workstations.

Amazing work! +1 for diskless win95! :D

yeah a new channel to bingewatch!!

There are similar methods for Lanmanager - UK based research machines used that to netboot windows 3.1 using the netbeui protocol, along with their own management tools bolted on the top for the administration side

The Drive Mappings used to be: H:\ HOME FOLDER Could also be U:\ (As in USER) K:\ COMMOM which it could also be P:\ PLUBLIC Folder P:\ Could also be PROGRAMS or APPS S:\ Could also be SOFTWARE While other Drive Mappings for different DEPARTMENTS or Purposes were done at IT/COMPANY's own discretion But the above were the usual recommendations for Drive Mappings

I love the random system names "discovery" vs "Europa" vs "TMS"

I worked for an accountant from 2006 to 2009,we used pcs from 1993 booting from Novell Netware on coaxial cable network, mostly using Pastel and Lotus 123. Had to get an ancient IT expert in any time something stopped working cause modern guys didn't even know what it was.

Running Windows 95 over a network is a pain in the butt! My best tip is to use non plug and play hardware and real ISA network cards. As loading the drivers upon boot have the same issue. The connection gets dropped. But I'm sure you're up for the challenge haha! I used the native Windows NT 4.0 server tools and Windows 95 RTM for testing

If you're struggling with DOS support under QEMU, what about DosBox? With some configuration, you can get IPX network support emulated over TCP/IP, which might help?

awesome content!

When I started high school just about the entire campus consisted of diskless workstations that booted DOS 6/Win 3.11 off 2 NetWare 4 servers. While it worked, sort of, the network was slow as Hell (especially at the start of a period when everyone was trying to boot the machines up and log in, and I don't think they had switches at that point, just hubs) and crashed often. Those machines were one of the reasons I (a complete Mac nerd at that point) used to hate PCs so much back then.

I used to deal with Netware 3.x for a large organisation with of couple of hundred servers. Luckily they avoided diskless operation, but the local drives were minimal size. You have terrible trouble mixing hardware configurations if you have nowhere local to store settings. Windows 3.0 and apps were loaded from the servers, with config files kept locally. They wanted to update to Win 3.11 ( AFTER release of Win95 !! ) and I was asked to organise a build. They wanted it done in my own time, over Christmas, so I quoted them a silly price to put them off. They agreed, so I ended up taking home enough kit to work with, The code I wrote analysed the PC hardware and wrote all the config files with optimised driver loading and the various .INI files to get WFW running.

I used RPL back in 1992-3 on with a token ring. On a "diskless computer, with a prom on the networkcard.

From back in my Netware admin days I remember net map insert search drives to map a drive letter and add it to PATH. I seem to remember that search drives started at Z: and worked down so these might conflict with your mapped drives.

This was really interesting and fascinating! It was also kinda funny seeing the exact same drive letter assignation logic as I used recently setting up permanent access to my NAS on a Windows machine (to obviate the need to go into the Network page every time). I chose X instead of Z, but the idea was still the same, in that no matter how many USB sticks or hard drives were connected later down the line, the NAS should never conflict. (And that machine did have 7 or 8 hard drives of various sizes, so it wasn’t merely a theoretical consideration!) I’m mostly used to *nix so the idea of being limited to 26 drives was still strange to me, but hopefully X:\ does its job for the medium-term future.

I did a lot of this "back in the day". I don't recall it being difficult back then. I know we used the Lanworks Technology Boot Rom's. I noticed you were loading VLM ... wasn't that used with Netware 4.x and above? Wouldn't you be using netx? It's hard trying to remember 30 years ago. Diskless workstations were great... as drives were relatively expensive, and reliably backing up local data was challenging.

Your content is so good! +1 subscriber here! Regards from São Paulo, Brazil.

Netware is interesting! my first dive in to diskless network booting is using the more recent PXE method, i've had success booting more modern OS's like Linux entirely over the network with a mix of TFTP for kernel and ramdisk and an NFS Share for the root, can't say the same for Windows though, but I did at least get DOS to load using 'memdisk' from the pxelinux project.

I did my fair share of ELS Level 1 and Level 2 servers (Compsurfing the drives took FOREVER) I didn't get my CNE till 3.12 and became a MCNE in 4.11, when I went to work for a Platinum reseller, and became the go to netware guy. I did networks with 1000's of workstation. I kept my CNE up to date until 6.5, when I spent most of my days moving people off of Netware to windows NT and 2000. Most of the time we just used boot disks on the workstation. Later with Windows 95 diskless we used the boot ROMS on the NIC, because that was the only way it was supported. Then after the original release of 95 we were on to local hard disks. If you are using Netware 3.12 there is no reason to use VLM. You can use NETX.exe. Netware 3.12 is bindery based. VLM was only needed for NDS which didn't come along till Netware 4. NETX take less memory as well.

COOL you can make the server and clients in Virtualbox?

My friends and I routinely ran DOOM, Duke, and descent via netware back in the day.

if i remember correctly from m ICLAS RPL bootin days, i think we used 3.12 and a unified driver too.

I enjoyed dos 5 and 6. I knew it like the back of my hand. Once I got into digital music I abandoned programming, which I now regret.

Can the server be done on a relatively modern pc so it's done as bg? It would be a interesting idea for disk less pc. The other thing is that making your own booting rom chip maybe is posible now with eeprom programmer so you can use any spare card with a socket.

There are a few Windows versions that show up nowhere: Windows 2000 Embedded. ( both local rom boot, and network boot ) Windows NT services for Enterprise ( remote boot ) Windows 7 for Legacy PCs had a Remote boot option, as well as... trying to rememer...

I'd LOVE to see Diskless Win95!

I am really happy to have discovered your channel and this video my elementary an junior high had novel systems configured just like this where everyone ran their programs off the server then windows 95 and 98 changed this but it was a really nice flash back I remember our Elementary had all ibm ps2 color all in ones set up to boot from the network via floppy just like you showed but we would get a login and then a menu of programs to choose from but very similar I will continue to follow along and see what you got coming up next

Is there an open-source replica project for NetWare3.11 like FreeDOS? I think IPX was perfect for LANs.

did you ever do diskless win 95?

I wish i had three thumbs. Great effort.

I just got M2 NVMe 1TB drive but I do remember...

oh cool, I have used a diskless Win95 Installation based on Netware. That was long ago but it worked fine.

What harddrive did Netware made?

FYI, QEMU is pronounced as "chemyou".

Arthur would be proud

Hmmm I wonder what if instead of period-correct hardware, I run this using a server with 10Gbps Ethernet and SSD instead?

I'm curious about where you picked up your pronunciation of DOS. I've been a PC user since the late '80s and have never heard anyone pronounce it with a Z sound.

Chad NetWare streaming games in dos era

Diskless workstations were very popular in 1990s.

Odyssey isn't normally spelled that way. Is that intentional?

3:55 "Odyssey_II"

Yes please for diskless win95 and win XP 😅

cloud computing in the 90s

I love Netware 4.12 back in the day but my fav remote desktop server is Windows NT Terminal server 4.0, I ran it for years as a workstation os on my Compaq Prosigna tower along with OS/2, largely bulletproof too since it was built for NT. A fine built tower.

how come sometimes you're calling it ODYSESSY_II and other times ODYSSEY_II ?

i also boot windows 3.1 diskless from netware server

Imagine running windows and disk I/O from a 1 token ring Ethernet network with 15 other people.

Doz.

QEWM

cool

hey ncommander i see in your github you mention the older rpl 802.3 boot i believe i am using the 802.3 on my ibm network i run a system in my house called ICLAS "IBM Classroom Lan Administration system if your interested in it i can send you all the files you need to play around with it i boot my workstations diskless with rpl

daws and kyoom

I just found your channel and I am liking the videos so far, but why in the world do you say "doz" every time for "DOS" and "QEMU" as "cume"? Sorry. It's just distracting since you say "doz" a lot.

Please win 95 diskless 😃

Ahh yes. The old novell network. I still have 3.12 on installl CD. But I dont know if someone would buy it.

No, we want to see diskless Windows98 SE just do it

Interesting process. It'd kinda be cheating, but an easier (and more modern way) to do this would be the VMware route, kinda like the x Users 1 cpu/GPU videos that LTT produces.

had to bail, "dawes" was triggering

Netware was so far ahead of windows for so many years. Sucks they were able to sink it with backroom deals...

I *tried* Remoteboot Windows 95. Unless you have period accurate ISA ethernet cards with the appropriate option ROM for each, you're not going to do it. Windows NT is seriously that bitchy about what exact card you have.

Qemu works fine for modern OSes, DOS just can't handle being run at 4ghz 😂

Dos. Doz. Gah

He pronounces "dos" "doz"

Odysessy = Odyssey lol

qbs lol

odysessy

who need they odysessy ate

you already failed being hard driveless, you used c: drive to start the logo

Ok in this era programs were not called apps, they were still called programs like they should be called. It's the stupid phone manufacurers that started calling them apps. Please STOP calling programs for apps. It's wrong!!!!