VOGONS


First post, by RJDog

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Lots of people on here seem to discuss the best way to share or distribute files via network between one's various retro machines. People debate SMB (e.g. Samba on Linux) or FTP server... myself, to date, have used an HTTP server on my LAN and that seems to work pretty universally for downloading/distributing files on to pretty much any machine (DOS, Windows, Mac) of any vintage, provided it has an Ethernet/IP interface.

But is there a better way? I was recently reminded of Novell NetWare... the permeating, prolific, and popular networking system of the late '80s and '90s. My high school used NetWare 4.something. My university used NetWare 5.something. Hell, even my church used NetWare 4.1... but I grew up in the South where church is big business, so maybe not globally representative.

Anyway, point is, there are NetWare clients for damn near any popular system between 1989 and 2005 (or so) -- DOS, Windows 9x, Windows NT/2000/XP, MacOS (classic), and versions available for all these systems that support NetWare 4.x. The DOS client even has a reputation for being lightweight compared to, say, Microsoft LAN Manager.

So my goal now is to set up a NetWare server and NetWare clients on all of my retro machines. I already have them all on a separate LAN than my "real" house LAN, so I could run that "retro" LAN as IPX-only. As relayed above, this also provides a good bit of nostalgia cred with me, having used many systems based on the Novell system in the '90s. I think I will try NetWare 4.11, as it seems to be the sweet spot with the newest version supported by the DOS client, and the oldest supported by the XP client.

So question is... virtual on my home Linux server, or dedicated hardware? I have a PII and a VIA Eden 1000 system, either I could dedicate to it... the PII would be more period correct, I suppose.

What are your experiences with NetWare? Do you think this project is worthwhile?

Reply 1 of 32, by mrau

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netware had an outstandingly fast filesystem iirc; but i cant really comment on software quality on client side; server was rock solid though; if you think of bare metal - this needs a lot of memory;

Reply 2 of 32, by Roman78

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Well... i am a CNA Certified Netware Administrator, needed one more Certificate to be an CNE Certified Novell Engineer, but at Netware 5.0, back in 2002/2003. And than they migrated to Windows Server 2003.

The Pentium 2 is the right system for it. For 4.11 even a bit to new. The 4.11 time frame is more 486/Pentium 1, but PII will do. You also can do it Virtual on some kind of XEN or ESX server. I don't know it it will run on Virtualbox or something, and the problem would be IPX/SPX i could imagine.

Hmmmm....

/edit: you you ahhh... damn...

Well it runs on Virtualbox. But did not test it further yet.

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And some to read: http://gwise.itwelzel.biz/Novellpdf/NetWare%2 … nstallation.pdf

/edit2:

Long time ago... memories coming back...

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Last edited by Roman78 on 2018-08-15, 09:35. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 3 of 32, by ruthan

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Im trying to do similar thing, you may be interested in my Dos TCP/IP networking thread:
Dos / Dosbox / Dos VMs ethernet / filesharing /network Dos to Win98-Win10 -WIP, help needed especially from Win admins..

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 4 of 32, by RichB93

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Sounds like a good idea - I have my older machines set up with TCP/IP and use FTP to transfer files, but a VM running this seems a bit better, plus games that are IPX/SPX only would benefit.

Problem is, I can't find a license for NetWare... Don't really fancy spending a ton of cash on a kit from eBay for a project.

Reply 5 of 32, by Roman78

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Yes, the licensing is a problem. But the good thing is, it wont do an online activation. 🤣

I don't know if i still have some 4.x licence here. I certainly have some 5.x licence somewhere.

Reply 6 of 32, by chinny22

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Also have a Netware server low, low down on my project list.
Only used 3.12 in a lab but did keep the 1 (or was it 2) user licence disk. I'll have a look and see if I have here in the UK with me, its not like you will have more concurrent connections on a retro network anyway.
I love physical servers but I think netware is awesome for a VM as its a true Server/Client setup where you run the admin tools from the client and almost never log into the server console itself.

Although from a practical side of things, TCP on Windows for Workgroups and up is just as good if not better for basic file sharing, the Dos client ruthan mentioned is a bit more of a pain to get up and running but still easier then a Novell server.

But having a fully running novel network gives you bonus cool points in my books no matter how unneeded it is 😀

Reply 7 of 32, by ruthan

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Can somebody pleas point out Netware main advantages for Pure Dos?
Does it have some multitasking workaround to remotely add or read data when user is doign something else that sit before some now - you can transfer files program screen, through some clever TSR etc? Or could it access to modern Windows 7/8/10 shares? Or does it some graphical client for file transfers?

Otherwise i dont see where could be big advantage in comparison to mTCP, which has very small 15 KB of conventional memory footprint depends on used packet driver and driver usually could be even unloaded and main file transfer tool is FTP server - you start ftp server on Dos machine and go to other machine, when you run some ftp client, modern and feature loaded as possible.. and FTP client / server is available to run virtually on every major OSes from new and from the past. mTCP has also FTP client - but its text based.. if someone would write graphical frontend with 2 panels manager i will not have to go to other computer and i would have everything what i need for file transfers..

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 8 of 32, by RJDog

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Roman78 wrote:

Yes, the licensing is a problem.

Yes, I'm not quite sure what to do about that other than purchase some on eBay and hope they work... but I understand from reading that 4.x comes with a 2-user license without adding on any other add-on licensing... which I think should be more than enough for what I need? I can't see having more than two retro machines logged on at the same time anyway... I might be able to get away with it.

ruthan wrote:

Can somebody pleas point out Netware main advantages for Pure Dos?

Novell NetWare's primary function is file sharing, and it does so by mapping (NetWare) network shares to local drives. The NetWare client for pure DOS is a TSR which redirects one or more drive letters to NetWare network file shares, so you can access files from any DOS program over the network share, live, without copying to local disk first. Pretty much exactly how Microsoft's SMB (and, earlier, LAN Manager) stuff works that everyone is familiar with... a mapped network drive. Except Novell had/has the reputation that their network stack (IPX/SPX) and associated tools for mapping drives and printers were/is much more lightweight than their competitors, namely Microsoft.

That, and Novell became ubiquitous in network computing, really until about the time that Windows 2000 Server and maybe even Windows 2003 Server really started upping their game and people started adopting those. But because of the ubiquity, Novell had login and file/drive mapping clients for just about any system that existed in the '90s (not just DOS and Windows, but also Mac, Unix, Linux, etc.).

Back to the licensing though, I have been looking at MARS_NWE as a NetWare emulator on a Linux host system (i.e. Samba for Linux, but NetWare instead of Windows/SMB) but it seems, from what I've read, to only emulate up to 3.11 version NetWare server which I could certainly use with DOS/Win9x, but very unclear if the client for 2000/XP supports this low version number... I can only confirm for sure they support 4.x.

Reply 9 of 32, by RichB93

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RJDog wrote:
Yes, I'm not quite sure what to do about that other than purchase some on eBay and hope they work... but I understand from readi […]
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Roman78 wrote:

Yes, the licensing is a problem.

Yes, I'm not quite sure what to do about that other than purchase some on eBay and hope they work... but I understand from reading that 4.x comes with a 2-user license without adding on any other add-on licensing... which I think should be more than enough for what I need? I can't see having more than two retro machines logged on at the same time anyway... I might be able to get away with it.

ruthan wrote:

Can somebody pleas point out Netware main advantages for Pure Dos?

Novell NetWare's primary function is file sharing, and it does so by mapping (NetWare) network shares to local drives. The NetWare client for pure DOS is a TSR which redirects one or more drive letters to NetWare network file shares, so you can access files from any DOS program over the network share, live, without copying to local disk first. Pretty much exactly how Microsoft's SMB (and, earlier, LAN Manager) stuff works that everyone is familiar with... a mapped network drive. Except Novell had/has the reputation that their network stack (IPX/SPX) and associated tools for mapping drives and printers were/is much more lightweight than their competitors, namely Microsoft.

That, and Novell became ubiquitous in network computing, really until about the time that Windows 2000 Server and maybe even Windows 2003 Server really started upping their game and people started adopting those. But because of the ubiquity, Novell had login and file/drive mapping clients for just about any system that existed in the '90s (not just DOS and Windows, but also Mac, Unix, Linux, etc.).

Back to the licensing though, I have been looking at MARS_NWE as a NetWare emulator on a Linux host system (i.e. Samba for Linux, but NetWare instead of Windows/SMB) but it seems, from what I've read, to only emulate up to 3.11 version NetWare server which I could certainly use with DOS/Win9x, but very unclear if the client for 2000/XP supports this low version number... I can only confirm for sure they support 4.x.

Unfortunately I've just tried 4.2 and it limits the connection to 1.

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Reply 10 of 32, by SteveC

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I loved Netware 3.12 back in the day. I remember having that running on a black AST Tower P90 and it was amazing serving as a file server for many clients (over 4/16mbps Token Ring) at my first place of work.

I remember this story too https://arstechnica.com/information-technolog … -beat-16-years/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/StevesTechShed
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SteveTechShed

Reply 11 of 32, by firage

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Hmm, I don't think one connection is really workable. 4.11 and 4.2 appear to have some kind of an activation scheme in place (NUNLOCK?) that requires an authorization key from Novell if you want to install licenses for additional users, too.

Edit: People say it does actually allow two connections by default, despite that message.

My big-red-switch 486

Reply 12 of 32, by akula65

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Novell and the entities that created study materials recognized that hands-on training was the way to go in certification study systems. So if you don't mind living with a limited number of connections, you might want to try to get some of the certification packages that had 3-user releases of Novell Netware 5. Some photos of disks and a few of these guides or certification packages are included below. The key thing will be to make sure you get (usable) disks if you get a used copy. Some of this stuff can still be found new. If memory serves, the server counts as a user, so you would get two concurrent connections.

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Reply 14 of 32, by RichB93

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Roman78 wrote:

I also have those Netware 5 Training-Kits here, including license disks. But not Netware 4. I asked my colleague, but he disposed those disks during the last clean-up. 😒

Would v5 be suitable? It still supports IPX from what I can tell.

Reply 15 of 32, by Roman78

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I don't know. Yes it still supports IPX and there is client software for W9x, WNT4, W2K, DOS (incl W3.x), OS2, MacOS and Linux/Unix. Although i could not find what MacOS version it supports. According to the age, i would say MacOS 8 and 9, maybe also OSX 10.0 - 10.4.

Reply 17 of 32, by ruthan

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mrau wrote:

is there any valid comparison that would show how netware outperforms the other solutions? or what is meant by "much more lightweight than their competitors"?

I doubt it because mTCP take afaik just take ~10KB of conventional memory, if is Netware better it has to be about features. I think that lightweigh think is in comparision with MS Client which in full blown version could eat ~150 KB at least Nebootdisk do that and MS client tutorials seems use same stuff:

LH C:\NET\NET INITIALIZE
LH C:\NET\NWLINK
LH C:\NET\NETBIND.COM
LH C:\NET\UMB.COM
LH C:\NET\TCPTSR.EXE
LH C:\NET\TINYRFC.EXE
LH C:\NET\NMTSR.EXE
LH C:\NET\EMSBFR.EXE
LH C:\NET\NET START

Enough memory eaters to eat whole your hamster..

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 18 of 32, by RJDog

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Roman78 wrote:

I don't know. Yes it still supports IPX and there is client software for W9x, WNT4, W2K, DOS (incl W3.x), OS2, MacOS and Linux/Unix. Although i could not find what MacOS version it supports. According to the age, i would say MacOS 8 and 9, maybe also OSX 10.0 - 10.4.

Yeah, I actually recently learned that newer DOS clients will in fact support NetWare 5.x, where I had previously thought 4.x was the newest DOS would support. I may yet look in to running a 5.x server rather 4.11... and if only because I am having slight trouble finding a NIC in my collection that 4.11 has drivers for.

That said, conversely, I have also recently found out that 4.8 version client for Windows XP supports NetWare 3.x, so I may still look in to MARS_NWE as a valid option.

As for "lightweight" memory usage, yeah, one would not compare it to mTCP as its not exactly the same functionality nor time period. The closest contemporary would be, of course, Microsoft's LAN client which, as noted, involves many TSRs and 150kb+ of RAM... good luck running a game with that loaded at the same time. Very likely (if not, exactly) the reason many DOS games of the time uses IPX as LAN multiplayer protocol.

Reply 19 of 32, by ruthan

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RJDog wrote:

Very likely (if not, exactly) the reason many DOS games of the time uses IPX as LAN multiplayer protocol.

I never played through network card at Dos, had these games whole IPX stack everytime inbuild or you have to have already something (network driver, Netware) installed?

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.