[rescue] Novell Netware

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 3 Sep 2019 at 01:47, Steve Sandau <ssandau at gwi.net> wrote:
>
> I bet that makes them for Netware 4.something. Netware 3.x was what I
> was using in 1995, and it was kind of old by then. Netware 4 showed up
> starting around then, so a date of '96 and '97 would suggest Netware 4.x
> to me.

Naah. NW4 was 1993 IIRC. NW3 was around by the late 1980s.

> I forgot how much I enjoyed working with Netware 3. It Just Worked.

It did, and it was extremely fast, but it wasn't very flexible. >1
server was hard, and all it did was file, print and at a push email.

NW4 was perhaps _too_ focussed on multi-server multi-site networks,
and was harder work on small single-server ones. What it could do was
amazing, though. And it was more flexible -- it could be a proxy or a
firewall, a VPN host, a web server, and more.

Unfortunately for Novell, NDS took planning, forethought and some
skill. NT domains didn't and were fine for small, single-site,
multi-server networks. A *massive* pain for big ones but even big ones
start out small. And an NT server could do almost anything an NT
desktop could do.

Netware 5 started to fix this, with a new filesystem, breaking the
iron limits on RAM/disk size in NW 2/3/4, TCP/IP as a native protocol,
and a GUI, albeit a fairly clunky one based on X.11 and Java.

Netware 6 was quite a rich, capable server OS but it was basically too late.

Damned shame. I liked working with it, too.


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