Jim Lawrence
accessd at shaw.ca
Thu May 8 19:37:33 CDT 2014
Hi Gustav: Ahh, the end of an era. A truly impressive lifetime. I always liked Netware, right from the beginning as it was easy to manage. (Even had my CNE certification). Arcnet, the barb-wire network, at 4MBit was solid as a rock but I hated Token-Ring...worked on a government contract for over a year, doing nothing but keeping the network running...it was so flaky. Too bad Novelle's efforts did not go into upgrading the product, instead of trying to create a competing product line to match Microsoft Office. Microsoft did end up buying out the company and for the next decade both companies worked on designing and building Linux versions Enterprise Suse and OpenSuse. Many of the larger old Novelle sites migrated in the direction. May your Netware, RIP. Jim ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gustav Brock" <gustav at cactus.dk> To: "Discussion of Hardware and Software issues" <dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com> Sent: Thursday, May 8, 2014 1:04:52 AM Subject: [dba-Tech] RIP - Novell NetWare Hi all This afternoon we will shut down our NetWare server. It is like reaching the last page of a very thick book. I've been with NetWare since version 2.0a in 1988 where ArcNet was used side by side with Token-Ring and Ethernet. My first installation used Unisys workstations with Intel 286 CPUs and Connect ArcNet cards. One workstation with an extra 1 MB ram was also the server - hardware was expensive those days. It ran for many years. Then was NetWare 3.12 and then 4.11 which ran our first corporate server in 1993 on a 486 home-built Micron server with 32 MB ram, later replaced with an HP server with 80 MB ram. However, the old server was not trashed but sold as second hand and served four POS systems until late 2010(!). The power supply broke down once and was replaced in three hours for about $100, and the 2 GB SCSI harddisk was replaced in 2003, those were the only errors experienced. How many systems live for 17 years? In 2004 our HP server was replaced with NetWare 6.5 Small Business Server on an IBM server. This is the installation which has run until this day for 9½ years, though the server was replaced 8 years ago. Three years ago it was clear that NetWare has no future despite its extreme reliability, so I started migrating this single server to Windows file and print servers and Active Directory. Still, the NetWare server ran GroupWise for e-mail and Apache for our web server. Three months ago I finally had all mail transferred to Office 365 (later, perhaps, an in-house Exchange server) and yesterday the last service, our web site, was moved to our new Fujitsu TX140 server running Windows Server 2012 R2 which also hosts two VMs. The Internet killed NetWare. It used the IPX/SPX protocols while everything should run TCP/IP. Microsoft was quite fast to adopt where Novell was not so fast, and TCP/IP always has been felt like an add-on as it was not native to the core of NetWare - administration of a NetWare server has always been a bit of a challenge. I never learned NW6.5 well - it was a job for specialists who we employed. So ... the boss (Rita, my wife) has been appointed - for the first and last time - to face the console at 15:00 UTC to type shutdown at the command prompt and press enter, closing the Novell book. /gustav _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com