See, my experience with NT of the era was more or less good, I just had issues w/ Exchange. I just finished filming a video about running apps from NetWare and diskless ops so maybe it will bring back some more memories. I do miss visiting Mexico; I took a really awesome road trip across most of the northern states. Maybe post pandemic I'll be able to visit again.

I got my CNE in the early 90's NW 2.2/3.11/3.12 and continued through NW5. The last I checked the NW5+ CNE cert never really expired which would mean I am still Netware certified.

@@NCommander When MS released Netware services for Windows NT Server, the handwriting was on the wall for Novell.

@@teekay_1 To be honest, I've been meaning to dig that up and take a look. I'm well familiar with the NT offerings, but not with NetWare Services for NT/2000.

@@NCommander I'll see if I can dig that up. I used to have it on the disks from the MS Developer program, but I may have thrown them out.

Really? I remember running this on a P66

some pieces of current Linux distributions are just as cryptic

Being a CNA got you a decent job. Having a CNE gave you your pick of jobs. Getting an MCNE meant headhunters calling all of the time. Now all of those have gone the way of the MCSE.

@@michaelmayfield4304 *cough* gentoo

@@wisenber Add in some Cisco knowledge and you really had a lot of calls.

I've been tempted to dig up MARS and Novell's UNIX offerings, but I'm not quite sure I'm ready to go down that tomb or horrors.

"What killed Netware was the products' inability to be a good host for server-side applications. " Novell did host Groupwise for email, word processing, accounting and a number of databases. What killed Novell was their nickle and dime license scheme where every printer required a seat, TCP/IP was an addon.....while Microsoft included all of that for free. In the late 90's, most of Microsoft's server applications were a work in progress like their SQL, Exchange and IIS.

Goodtimes, raised on NetWare 6.0 - NSS storage pools & volumes (including SYS) Awesome

3.x servers were as close to bulletproof as a server could get. 4.x introduced NDS which made managing MAN/WAN installations much easier. Backups were a pain though. Half of the media would fail within a year, but that wasn't a Netware issue.

It's all happiness until it comes day to replace bindery with eDirectory and figure out the nightmare MSFT called a remote boot solution for Win95.

I loved novel in the 90s

That’s because that is basically all it did, serve files. Honestly it was completely overrated and a pile of shit. Good riddance!

@@NCommander NDS fell between the bindery and eDirectory. The move from bindery to NDS wasn't intuitive, but it was a huge move forward. Microsoft's Directory probably didn't match NDS performance until Server 2003 or 2008. NT didn't even have Directory Services, but NT could run Novell NDS.

@@chswin "That’s because that is basically all it did, serve files. " Serve files, manage users, manage groups, manage printing, host applications, host databases, update clients along with connecting to other network running SNA. All of that while using few resources and having next to no downtime. I never had to wait for hours watching a screen saying "installing updates", or "this will take a few minutes" or "we're almost done". And their servers never got infected.

I actually have a video coming out in 7 hours that goes more into NetWare and RPL booting so it'll probably bring back more memories!

Yes, here in Germany i install many server on Netware 2.2, 3.12, 4.11 and last 5.1. A lot of night-work ....

What's funny is I actually intend to demo RPL booting with diskless Windows and OS/2. It's really quite trippy to setup and see it go.

That's awesome. My school district used NetWare as well. The middle school computer lab ran DOS on 486s, and the teachers had Windows 95 on Pentiums. At some point one of the students figured out there was a hidden games directory on the server and then we were all playing Stunts. I moved away and came back at the end of high school and they were still using NetWare with Windows 98. I figured out how to hack the security software and Internet proxy and could do anything I wanted. Life was pretty great.

Yeah, a lot of times, the patches get lost so I was happy to find them.

Honestly, I've heard so many mixed thing about 4.x and why people refused to upgrade that I might honestly have to not only set it up and test it, I might have to do an upgrade from 3.x->4.x and experience the Bindery migration first hand.

As soon as I can find bring myself to get a compatible NIC, I intend to dig up Novell UnixWare and basically abuse it for 20 minutes.

Oh, that’s pretty interesting. Both of my primary schools were run off of Win 2k (I was on good terms with the “IT department”, one lady, in my second one especially, so she showed me all around her management console). I’m not sure what my secondary school ran off, though I’m assuming it was *nix as there was a single server rack cabinet in the room and a Mac Mini was used to interface with their shells. I doubt it was OSX Server but I suppose anything’s possible. But we all used Windows XP day-to-day so the experience of going from the primary to the secondary school as a student wasn’t dissimilar at all. They had the same software offering a login box at boot, and the same net nanny software that would block searches containing words like “proxy”. Perhaps it was actually Server ‘03 or straight-up 2k on the rack systems, using the same user management system as my primary schools, but if so I don’t know why they used a Mac Mini to interface with it.

Pun intended?

Glad you enjoyed it!

UTP Token Ring, or did you have Cat 5? I'm working on a TR network, but having slight problems with the token falling out of the ring.

fire phasers, an easter egg that is indeed documented in the manual.

Hah me too :) Did lot of 3.11 and 3.12 installs as well. Did the mirrored server once, that was really cool :) Would be fun to set up a 3.11 server now and see if it is still possible to connect to them some how :) I really liked Netware file security better than Windows NT acl's and Unix :)

🤣

Like a Dawwse!

I do actually! I have a version of NetWare 2.0a (oldest known surviving version) ELS I for PS/2 that I dumped and does a mandated COMPSURF. I actually patched it out on my test copy. Sadly, I can't demostrate the oldest surviving NetWare version because this version is for StarNet cards and can't load with NE2000 cards or anything similar :/

sadly, no 8088 versions have been dumped and preserved.

Qutie a bit of early network software did that since DOS did have an API for file locking. The early MS Mail client, Visual Safe Source and loads more basically did all that.

the 1.x and 2.x versions were basically more you had a tech come to your company, and set it up for you. I did a stream on ELS NetWare 2.1, and *wow*, what a mess. 3.x was roughly when it started getting to the point you didn't needed an onstaff CNE.

Well, that problem also exists on OS/2 and Macintosh. For OS/2, only parts of the login script are parsed (specifically nothing relating the PATH or env). I don't know how it behaves on Mac, but I'm guessing nothing gets run there. Novell's UNIX history is down right bizarre. They bought UNIX off the remains of Ma Bell with the intent of killing it, and then ended up creating UnixWare w/ SCO as an upgrade path from NetWare before buying and adopting SuSE. This is how Novell ended up defending much of the SCO Group lawsuits because they claimed to own UNIX. I've actually run the NetWare OS/2 client and it's a *very* strange beast. It attaches to L: by default and maps to SYS:PUBLIC/OS2, but it also has a graphical client which uses something similar but not quite the DOS ODI client (I think the ODI client started life on OS/2 and then was ported to DOS).

Later NetWare (past say 1996) uses PXE, so this was not commonly used.

I've been debating digging up that monster of yesteryear, but I kinda want a 286 for it.

Yes, it did!

Actually, I do want to talk about 2.xx, I recently archived NetWare 2.0a ELS I which actually has a simpler install mechanism (four total drivers!) than any other version of NetWare, and is entirely missing a ANET for an Ethernet topology. There's another 2.0a ELS dump that does it, but mine was for PS/2 machines so it only has IBM's StarNET driver. 2.12/2.15, I'm waiting until I have a period correct 286 for because I frankly want to test it against OS/2 LAN Manager. That being said, I just recently installed 3.11 (one version before this one), and it had WSGEN so it was still the worst parts of building NETX, and amazingly NetWare didn't ship DOS 5 or 6 compatible drivers in a package branded with 1993 copyright dates! COMPSURF is going to make an appearance in the near future on my 486 Restore video assuming I can find an NLM for it's strange SCSI controller because it's probably the most comprehensive disk torture utility that will work with something of that vintage (since I can't find a better HDD sanity tester for SCSI). I also want to compare NetWare 4/5 to NT, because I do want to understand what eDirectory was all about.

@@NCommander Cool! I'll be looking forward to that. It had been a mission of mine to relive my Netware 2.15 experience. I ended up installing it on a 486DX33 with a WD1007 RLL controller and 40Mb hard disk sourced from eBay. The LAN card proved difficult to source because I needed UTP support. Then, of course, I had to build a DOS workstation with IPX/NETx drivers. It took a couple of days of work (because of failed/misunderstood steps during install) but I got there. It was really fun, and Netware 2.15 turned out to work quite happily with post 2000 years!

@@markborchers6613 ... so what you're telling me is Novell introduced Y2K bugs in 3.x that aren't in 2.x? Why am I not surprised ...

@@NCommander Mmmmm... not necessarily. Rollover from 1999 to 2000 on a running server might not have worked, but any date AFTER 2000 is displayed and processed seemingly correctly.

@@NCommander Sorry I swapped out my 286 Board for a 386 (there was not much need for what I had to retain the 286). Most of my computers are 486 models which did the job for years

TCPIP is standard on NetWare 3.12, no license disk required. I could probably hexedit a disk if needed. That being said, NetWare itself doesn't use TCPIP, its just available for other applications.

@@NCommander hmm HexEdit a disk? Yea, please do that, not sure what format do theese disks use (how does netware distinguish between 50 or 100 user disk?)? BTW: was always wanting to run netware as aserver of some sort, not just as a file and print server but a database, and mail and (not sure would ftp or http even work over ipx) server as well

On the (very long) list of videos I want to make, I do sort of want to explore what happened with NetWare 4 and 5 and what spelt the beginning of the end for NetWare

​@@NCommander I firmly believe NT was the beginning of the end of NetWare. Google: " Bill Gates and Novell NetWare."

@@waynejennings7046 I think it was also due to the fact that from 1989 to 2000, NetWare was basically unchanged, and eDS was rather ... disliked to use a word.

@@NCommander I did not want to express my feelings about a certain individual and his piracy tactics. However, his company acquired the edge over several others through sly tactics.I believe Active Directory was the big thing then from Novell. Novell was the networking king then - I never saw it coming that Novell would have been toppled so quickly. Was sDS the problem? Possible. ( Novell did sue them over Wordperfect but I do not know about networking) www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/novell-sues-microsoft-over-false-advertising

​@@waynejennings7046 eDS had a six years head start over Active Directory, and I've yet to find anyone say anything *good* about it. Most people say good things about the file/print services, but everything seems to want to pretend eDS wasn't a thing. I don't know if it was a MSFT problem or if it was an issue with the backend. At least on paper, eDS was much more capable than NT domains of the era, but I also remember NT domains being fairly robust.

It's on my list of things to try.