Migrating old Novell Netware server to VM

I did work on this trying it on Hyper-V and failed. There were very specific settings to get it to run under Proxmox. When you search for Netware Proxmox and Hartig or contact me directly, you will find the link to the Blog.

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The-Jesus_Christ@reddit

Oh wow lol. Offtopic but I used to love Novell Netware. First few years as a syadmin was working local govt with Netware and Lotus Notes. Blast from the past!

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Ams197624@reddit

Ah, Lotus Notes, that brings back memories :)
And I started at Novell 3.12, migrated a large insurance company to 4.11, but after that it was all Microsoft crap.

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amburator7@reddit (OP)

Thanks everyone for the help and advice!
Got some great ideas and now I know where to start. Will post an update if I manage to get something done.

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udum2021@reddit

Let me count the oldies in this thread.

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atrawog@reddit

We are lean and young and think that 640kb of RAM is all you need.

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atrawog@reddit

I would check the hard disk type first and have the necessary equipment at hand to get the hard disk out of the server and do the disk cloning on another system.

You're best plan A is to reboot the server and clone the disks over the network with a tool like Clonezilla. But you should have a plan B at hand in case the server fails and you have to recover directly from the hard drives.

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qwertymartes@reddit

You could create a image of the disk using clonezilla And then create a VM

This is something that i only have tested on my head

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amburator7@reddit (OP)

Clone over network?

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OptimalCynic@reddit

Break out the laplink cable!

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qwertymartes@reddit

No, to a pendrive or external disk

But you can try it (do a backup firts)

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user_is_always_wrong@reddit

clonezilla can stream the source disk to another clonezilla destination instance. I've never done it. Always clone to local usb drive or smb/nfs share. That way I always have backup if the drive die while messing with it

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boofis@reddit

How much data are you talking about here?

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amburator7@reddit (OP)

Not sure, we have backups from 2011 to 2020, but the problem is if I have to access it when I need to view old documents.

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boofis@reddit

You have no idea how large the file shares are?

Can you not just map it to a windows VM then robocopy the data over? It’s a novel box from 19-dickity-do, there really can’t be much more than a couple of hundred gig right?

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hkeycurrentuser@reddit

Jesus - "a couple of hundred gig" Just think about that.... In 1995, a 500MB disk was huge. My Novell server that looked after 20 Caddies (AutoDesk 11,12,13) had a 1GB disk.

"a couple of hundred gig" at that time would have blown my naive little mind...

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VoodooKing@reddit

Holy... Novell Netware. I haven't heard that name in a long long time. Is migration even possible

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QPC414@reddit

Giving this an up vote for no other reason than missing the Netware 2.2 3.12 and 4.11 servers I worked on 25+ years ago.

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Cheesqueak@reddit

I did this many years ago and remember I had to manually create drivers for the drives and faking out the token network. Pain in the ass. This was on esxi the year before they introduced vsphere which broke the damn thing.

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cats_are_the_devil@reddit

VMware vSphere | Virtualization Platform

Will convert your machine P2V.

You could also do a restore to a new vm from your backups.

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Level_Working9664@reddit

NetWare.. is this a gag?

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notbullshittingatall@reddit

I was able to successfully do this on a netware v4.xx about 15 years ago. I did have to take the server down. The data disks were mirrored. I think I used DOS 6.22 as the OS and I think I may have used dd to copy all the data over but I'm not sure. The Server only had 2GB of data on it and I do remember having trouble with the scsi drivers but I don't remember much else.

Good luck!

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noideabutitwillbeok@reddit

Do you have a Windows server in place that you could migrate the data to? Portlock made a migration tool years ago but it's been a LONG time. There also is/was a guy out of the Seattle area (maybe Bothell) who did this stuff, he was quirky, a bit of a tool, but it was a service he offered.

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11CRT@reddit

I was going to suggest a windows server, or appliance like an array of disks just to move the data to, while servers are setup, or cloud services are created.

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noideabutitwillbeok@reddit

With a Windows server he could just drop a PC between them with the NW client on it, then copy it over. Not sure how rights move, but clean up what's on Data, then shift it all over.

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11CRT@reddit

Yeah, I was just speculating that depending on the version of Novell that there will be a workstation involved in moving the data between netware and the new server.

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noideabutitwillbeok@reddit

Yeah, hopefully 6.5 or so but at 30 years old, damn, better not be 3.12 or earlier.

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11CRT@reddit

I still have nightmares about Netware 3.11 and SFT-2.

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pdp10@reddit

SFT-2.

Pretty rare to need that. Finance?

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noideabutitwillbeok@reddit

I started my first IT job and a month later was told we had to migrate to 3.12 as they were on the older bindery one. That was a shitshow. I knew nothing about it as I was just a basic helpdesk guy. We had NT 3.51 in place, which I knew. But the admin was told we had to have netware, he didn't want it, so he setup the 3 default shares, hoping they'd not notice. They did notice lol. Thankfully I was able to plead my case with the CIO, who sent one of the roots down to do the install. He did the migration and I ran around installing the client on every PC in the place. That made for an interesting 27 hour day. Lesson learned? if you have a hella long day ahead, don't wear dress shoes/etc. Rock some tennies, jeans, and a T.

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JazzlikeAmphibian9@reddit

Is migration of the data an option?

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amburator7@reddit (OP)

If it would work then yes. My main concern is the lifespan of the server - it's over 30 years old and it's a matter time before something fails.

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pdp10@reddit

Wait, Netware 3.x? A good and simple version, if so.

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Gold-Antelope-4078@reddit

Fire up a new Windows Server VM. Then either restore the data from last nights backup or map a drive and use a utility to copy the data.

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pdp10@reddit

For legacy systems we hand-build a drop-in compatible hardware configuration in QEMU, starting with the last-running hardware (or VM) and then systematically testing potential simplifications.

CPU and system architecture;
BIOS or UEFI. 32-bit hardware doesn't normally ever use UEFI.
Boot drive type. Typically, anything with the right boot-blocks and device path will work, as long as there's a driver in the OS, so one can "simplify" from SAS to SATA, SCSI to ATA as long as support is in the guest OS kernel.
NIC type. Definitely requires driver support.
Cloned MAC address -- very often used for licensing.
Optical drive type, if any.

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smellybear666@reddit

Just migrate the data. Keeping the server that it lives on is just asinine.

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Mcuatmel@reddit

There are some success stories with virtualizing novell 4.11 into oracle virtualbox. Challenge is (ipx) networking

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Sk1tza@reddit

Are we talking Netware 6.5? Or later? Not even sure modern tools would be able to do a p2v with something that old. I think you are better off spinning up a new one and migrate the data asap. What services are you running on it? Not edir I hope?

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amburator7@reddit (OP)

Netware 4. Not sure about services, I inherited the server. Those who knew how to work with that have been gone from the company long ago.

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gnordli@reddit

That is awesome. It has been a long time since I have seen one of those.

Just getting the files off of the machine through a copy command onto something current is probably the best strategy unless there are some other "services" running on it.

If you were to try to do some disk copy, I would try to get it up on KVM as the hypervisor. You can set it as an older CPU model.

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jdptechnc@reddit

That is what my first corporate job was running in when I started... in 2003.

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Zeitcon@reddit

Oh shoot! That takes me back to when I had my clammy hands on Netware 3.12/4.11 servers!

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Hel_OWeen@reddit

Those kinda servers typically only acted as file/print servers (and authentication, but I assume your org does that in another system nowadays).

So copying over the files with a workstation that has the Netware CLient installed and can access the Novell file system, is most likely all you need to do.

Setting up the appropriate rights structure again will be more challenging. Haven't touched a 4.x Netware server for decades, so I'm currently blanking on where to look for the rights on the server itself. IMHO the (Windows) Novell client shows you these in a folder's "Property" menu.

Anyhow - copy the files over, convert users/tools to use the new location, let the server run in parallel in case something's missing is how I'd approach it.

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Sk1tza@reddit

It’s literally been 20+ years lol. IBM server? Netware 4 is just too old me thinks to really do anything with it. I’d start pulling the data from it or hope to god your backups are good? What are you using to back it up? Arcserve? Tivoli?

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solace666@reddit

We did this a few years ago with a company called Portlock. We have four Netware 4.11 servers running in our VMware environment (vSphere 7).

I'm not even sure the company exists anymore, hard to find info. But we had them help us do the migration.

https://netware-server.de/download/tools/disk/portlock/NetWare_4.11_Virtualization.pdf

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Outside-After@reddit

If you can still get a copy of the old cold clone ISO that VMWare did, this may well be worth trying a P2V against.

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rabbitsnake@reddit

Please tell us the uptime on this server. My record for netware 6.5 was 1250 days.

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Burgergold@reddit

I hope you still have apps able to open those files

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the_doughboy@reddit

Is there still a migration path via Windows Server 2000?

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GurgleBlaster68@reddit

Since server reboot/shutdown is not an option for you, simple file migration (file copy) is the way. But, if there is a Btrieve-based database running on a server, file migration is not an option. In that case, you should clone disk(s) with Clonezilla using sector-to-sector copy (you can use some other disk cloning tool too). I did that with a Netware 5.1 server some 15 years ago. But starting Clonezilla requires a reboot, and you said that could be a problem.

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Gold-Antelope-4078@reddit

You have good backups right?

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amburator7@reddit (OP)

Yes

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hkeycurrentuser@reddit

If the data hasn't changed since the last good backup, you could try to restore from that rather than put stress on what will be really old hardware.

There are specialist companies who can do the retrieval for you too. They will return that data on a modern disk.

That way you're not touching your systems.

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wrt-wtf-@reddit

If the server is not running a database on btrieve then there shouldn’t be an issue with migration of files.

You haven’t said which release of Novell - but that shouldn’t really matter.

The only viable way I can think of to migrating the system as a whole is to shut it down and P2V the drives… but, the HDD drivers for Novell were a bit special with their strobing solution - so not sure how that would stack up in a virtual setup - and that’s not taking into account and specialised raid setups you may have.

So, if it’s not providing a database service and not providing authentication - later releases did ldap - then file migration and archival is the point of concern which can be managed in multiple ways without shutting the system down.

If you’ve got full admin rights then things will be a lot easier too.

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TrippTrappTrinn@reddit

You have two challenges:

Creating a bootable virtual disk Driver support for the virtual drivers.

Based on experience from a long time ago, VMware has emulation for generic devices like disk and network which should probably work with Novell. Not sure if Hyper-V has this.

Creating a bootable virtual disk is probably the main challenge. A quick google found a reference to a utility called platespin which is created for this.