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This week, reader “Earl” tells us that just this year he responded to “a Craigslist ad for a Novell NetWare Admin to figure out why .nlm files would not be loaded and fix the issue.”
[...] The return call came “almost instantly” and Earl “gave them my expensive price and advised them that I was not the first choice for a NetWare admin, but I had extensive system troubleshooting experience.”
Those caveats didn't matter: the person who placed the ad said he's run it for months and months and never had a reply from anyone in the USA. Earl was just 90 minutes away by train and got the gig.
When Earl visited the site, he was told that an electrical storm had taken out the NetWare server and Windows 95/98 clients. Said server was a Dell PowerEdge 1300 with 64MB of RAM and a 10GB IDE hard drive. Earl reckons it was built in 1997 or 1998, so was a bit taken aback when told this was “the new server”.
[...] Next came a request to boot up the Compaqs, which had power supply and fan failures. A request to swap the disks from the dead Compaqs was not something Earl could do, as they had tossed out the necessary SCSI cables a few years back.
Earl was asked to do all of these things so the company could run its bespoke accounting program, which was written for it in 1993.
The developer, it turned out, had died in 2001. But the source code was in the company safe … on about 2000 pages of dot matrix printer paper. And there were backups of the old data … on 20 years worth of floppy disks and a pair of CD-ROMs.
[...] Earl told the company that they'd need a working server, running NetWare, before he could even begin to contemplate the task of typing in the source code so he could see if the backups could be restored. Then he'd have to hope that a Pascal compiler could cross-compile for NetWare to have even a chance of setting things to rights.
To the company's credit, it tried hard to meet his requests. Two weeks later Earl says he returned to the company, where a working PowerEdge 1300 with a PCI network awaited.
[...] But he didn't have his own monitor.
[...] He somehow got to work. DOS 6.22 and all the device drivers “installed like a charm”. NetWare 4.1 installed. It was seen by both Windows 95 and 98 on the frail network. Now it came time to restore the application.
But it turned out that the stack of disks contained only data, not the application. Even the 10MB disk from the “old” server was uselessly corrupted.
Earl tried to explain this problem, but the client was having none of it and showed him the door.
Earl tells The Register the client owes him about US$5,000.00 for his time and is showing no signs of paying up. At least he didn't have to re-type all that source code: perhaps there weren't enough keyboards in the office!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by NCommander on Saturday August 06 2016, @01:14PM
As someone who has (and currently is) working full time freelancer, I can sympathize with Earl. Some clients are remarkably poor at providing people with what they need to successfully do the job. I had a more recent version of this involving development with VNC due to lack of hardware at previous employers.
Having a dot matrix printout of the source goes far better than how a lot of these stories go. I initially learned how to read x86 assembly for dealing with "ancient app with no source" usecase. The article doesn't say when this happened, but I'm guessing 2002-2003 back when doing a mass read-in OCR wasn't too common.
NetWare as a server side platform was a very very strange beast. In terms of programming, it was very much like DOS with Win 3.1 multitasking schematics. The entire thing ran in Ring 0, and NLMs basically linked right into the kernel. To get a working NetWare server, you had to link a special kernel with your drivers and application NLMs, reboot and pray. Relinking kernels isn't exactly unusual (it wasn't until Solaris 2.1 that kernel modules started becoming common in UNIX), but having to toss the application in was a bit far. Add in the fact the entire thing ran on IPX for networking until Netware 5, and you have an environment that is very unique.
Multitasking was cooperative in nature, and processes had to yield control back to the scheduler or the entire thing would go ka-flunk. NW ran with an identity memory map, so a buffer overrun could not only take out your app, it could go take out the kernel while it was at it. I've never heard of Pascal being used for app development on NetWare; as far as I know Watcom was the official compiler (NW support lives on in OpenWatcom), and that was about it (you could use GCC if you wanted to pull teeth).
Where Netware shined was it was stupid fast for its era, and since generally you had very few applications on it, it tended to be remarkably rock solid on the server despite the above (the client side was an entirely different baileywick). I never got a chance to play with it in production, but I did a fair bit of reading through the documentation and such. WOn't mind finding a few ISOs of older NetWare and seeing if I can coax it to run in a VM to study it.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Saturday August 06 2016, @05:20PM
I still have my Novell 3.12 server operational (although.. it's not particularly fast in modern terms). It is on a Cyrix 5x86 120mhz processor; about the speed of a pentium 90 or 100 in comparison. 4 IDE drives were used as the mountable file share.
For the network file share speed, it was definitely faster than NT 4.0 when it came to IPX (compared against both servers-- even though the NT 4.0 server eventually became a quad processor proliant). It took a gigabit card running TCP/IP to beat the Novell 100mb IPX to finally see a reason to migrate for my local storage needs. I still use it for a windows 98 laptop I have (which I recently loaded doom 1 and 2 onto for the fun of it and to try out Carmack's new e1m9 map prior to the latest Doom's release. Wireless IPX or go get fragged!)
In any event, I think a difference between you and me is that you are asking for ISOs of an older Novell Network Operating System, and I am envisioning reaching for a box of diskettes. I do not believe I actually ever owned a "Novell CD"; infact, none of the Novell servers I ever encountered even had a CD drive of any kind... Someone out there would have had the foresight to create what you are looking for while they still had a working floppy drive and working installation media.
I guess if you find that, let me know... I also would dig a copy of Lantastic or Banyan Vines while you are at it..
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Saturday August 06 2016, @06:03PM
NetWare as a server side platform was a very very strange beast. In terms of programming, it was very much like DOS with Win 3.1 multitasking schematics. The entire thing ran in Ring 0, and NLMs basically linked right into the kernel. To get a working NetWare server, you had to link a special kernel with your drivers and application NLMs, reboot and pray.
It was never really intended for customer side processes running on the server. That all arrived late in its life cycle driven by third party backup tasks and database servers - all written by large companies partnering with Novell.
Nobody I ever ran into designed any customer applications to run on the server. Launched From the server, using data from the server, sure. But running ON the server, was avoided like the plague.
(I installed and maintained a lot of netware servers in my day).
Novell really didn't go out of their way to encourage server side applications.
And if you stayed away from crazy shit like that it was the most amazingly stable platform I've ever worked on. Many Virtual Machine environments still support Netware as a Guest VM.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday August 06 2016, @06:36PM
YOu know, thinking about this, I wonder of TFA is getting more than a few details wrong. An accounting app on NetWare does seem kinda ... odd, esp, considering its written in a language that isn't generally used for dev on NetWare.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Saturday August 06 2016, @06:44PM
Reminds me of a story I read many years ago. Server 54 where are you ?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/ [theregister.co.uk]
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge