Life's a strange thing.
From 1998ish till 2006 I always joined my home PC's to a domain, namely a part's built NT4 box with a bunch of HDD's for storage.
I actually preferred how 9x-XP behaved when joined, and didn't see a non domain XP install for a good few years.

These days I have NT3.51, NT4, 2k, DC's but haven't joined any of my gaming rigs instead using old laptops for the workstation/client side of things.
I guess what's holing me back is they are just mess around servers to tinker with so I'm just as likely to do a complete reinstall of a server as I am a PC.
Other reason is 99% of the time they are switched off.
Both are poor excuses though as both are easily fixed and I do feel like I should at least join them to some domain, yet I still don't.

but yeh, I'm no help with finding the software (and admit my interest in Novel is limited to the dos based versions) but I fully support your thinking and will read with great interest if you create a post about setting it all up 😀

RJDog wrote on 2020-12-05, 23:59:

Hopefully this sparks some good discussion

Not from me, I don't have anything to add 😀 Yes, it's a good solution and I've done it myself too, although I haven't used Services of NetWare in anger.

does anyone have this software or know where I could get it? It seems I can buy a legit(?) copy at various online retailers for about US$15, which doesn't seem too bad, but if I don't need to spend $15, I won't. That said, if there's no other choice, then I won't hesitate to buy one and then maybe, coincidentally, a copy will find its way to a certain Internet Archival site.

It was available for free download from Microsoft, I got it in 2018 but it doesn't seem to be available now. This is probably where I got it from: https://web.archive.org/web/20171016172626/ht … s.aspx?id=13054 It says it's for 2003, but the documentation says 2000 is supported and I don't recall having any problems on 2000. Microsoft's complicated download system doesn't work properly on archive.org, but the "click here to download manually" link after you get the first file has a set of working links. The binaries match what I downloaded in 2018, although the HTML files seem to have been modified by archive.org.