I did replace Novell Netware for mars_nwe for my retro Windows install
And reverted to etherdfs for DOS/W3.1
I needed a shared drive for all my retro PC / OS to be able to access and the ability to upload files on the server from my recent hardware.
Samba was a no go (don't support smb1 anymore afaik)
ftp is annoying to use
NFS have issue when using client and server from different epoch all in the same time
etherdfs work great, for DOS client
So I did initially revert to installing a Netware 4.11 VM, with did work great for DOS, W3.11 and W95 clients, but out of the box I can't connect from recent Windows and Linux. And I was running it on a KVM VM. The CPU is always running at 100% in that kind of configuration, so it generate noise. So I decided to install the TCP and IP support then install FTP server on that netware server so I can dump file from my recent PC to the network share. Reliability go down like a rock when I was using FTP...
Ended up trying 6.5 SP8, mostly because it come with some kind of unlimited license, native support for TCP/IP and it also come with a FTP server by default. But then while installing and using it I noticed it ate 12 poutines a day between the 4.11 and 6.5 version. So bloated and slow... Take > 5 minutes to boot easy on a 4 cores VM (i5 8400t)... For comparison, the 4.11 take like 5 seconds to boot... And the 100% CPU usage and the Instability when using FTP are still present.. only, instead of just getting big lag for the many clients, it freeze the server (and the clients 🤣).
So I managed to compile IPX linux module (using DKMS so it recompile it automatically on kernel upgrade), And mars_nwe. Seam to work great so far, So I can continue to use etherdfs on DOS and W3.1, but windows 95 can connect to the share with the same exact netware client I was using for the real thing. And I can just dump file on the server, from recent machines, using samba.