Novell NetWare Still In Usage

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djslakor@reddit

NDS & Zenworks was so much better than AD & Group Policy.

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rp_001@reddit

Permission inheritance etc.was so good. App deployment, so easy.

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Poulito@reddit

ZenWorks for the win!

And yeah, file system permissions were better in 2001 on NetWare than they are today on MS.

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MS totally stole a ton of things from Netware. Here's another cool tidbit of IT trivia. Novell used to have a product called iPrint that was great and ahead of its time. In fact, the guy that started the company PrinterLogic was a Novell iPrint guy.. Those two products were VERY VERY similar at one time.

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MrSanford@reddit

Eh, Microsoft stole from a lot of companies but Novell wasn’t one of them. They’re both just based off of X.500 and LDAP. What Microsoft did do was sabotage apis so Novell products didn’t work well or at all.

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admiraljkb@reddit

Banyan Vines has entered the chat

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mr_datawolf@reddit

Now there is a name I haven't heard in a long...long time

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MrSanford@reddit

Exactly.

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bythepowerofboobs@reddit

That's just not true. They were both based on X.500 and LDAP, but the hierarchical, object-based, centralized directory structure of NDS was absolutely stolen from Novell.

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MrSanford@reddit

You could also say Novell stole it from StreetTalk.

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rcook55@reddit

We use PrinterLogic today, works great, and very Novell-ish.

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halxp01@reddit

I still use zenworks.

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BabbatheGUTT@reddit

And NDS was and remains better than AD too.

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seamonkey420@reddit

OMG! i loved zenworks.. i could do so much with it. add in some autoit.. oh yea!

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SparkStormrider@reddit

Dude I came in here to say this. File system perms on netwear was freaking GOAT. I missing running that system.

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IamHydrogenMike@reddit

Netware was so good...MS broke them with money and made everything so much worse.

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ImmediateLobster1@reddit

Agreed on the permissions. I helped admin a Novell site with 300+ users. Later went somewhere smaller where I took on IT as my secondary role. <10 users on SBS 2003. I couldn't figure out how permissions could be such a pain!

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arvidsem@reddit

Don't forget the Salvage functions.

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PhillyGuitar_Dude@reddit

I remember when I was getting my (now incredibly outdated) Windows 2000 era MCSE. One of the guys in my study group was like "this is stupid, nothing will knock off Novell".....

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Mutsy007@reddit

I remember running NetWare 2.15 on a Compaq server with 2 x 300MB external drives. Those were the good old days!

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cdheer@reddit

Former CNE here. I started with 2.15. Worked for a reseller selling big ALR towers with Storage Dimensions’ pre-COMPSURFed SCSI drives.

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kennyj2011@reddit

I still have my CNA card on my desk at home

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KalRaist@reddit

Compaq ASE for NetWare. The yearly all-paid trips were so effing awesome.

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PlsChgMe@reddit

Didn't use it but I remember installing NW 2.11 back I guess in about 87 or 88 - It was on two or 3 boxes of 3.5 inch floppies and you didn't know if your installation was good until you cycled them all through the drive. After finally getting it installed and running, I remember the battles I fought with RPRINTER and also getting diskless network workstations to boot up, there was some obscure patch you had to apply to the server to enable the ROMs in the diskless workstations to pull DOS and a client over the network. Fun times!

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su_A_ve@reddit

Doom over ipx!!

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Bearded-Wacko@reddit

I worked at a Novell Training company in the 90s and we would build networks as part of class. Then the staff would play Doom or Quake on them after hours.

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BisexualCaveman@reddit

So good on the workstations in the GIS lab.

Quake too, IIRC...

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iron233@reddit

Dude we old AF

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BabbatheGUTT@reddit

I miss Novell Netware :(

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vandon@reddit

I miss nsnipes with friends

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cdheer@reddit

Fire phasers 5 times!

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vandon@reddit

lol, our compsci teacher said we couldn't put that in our login scripts because she had it in her admin account login.

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the_mhousman@reddit

I saw it at a place I worked at in the 90’ and I almost got Netware certified. I thought it was going to be huge and wanted to work with it.

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HoosierLarry@reddit

Just replace it with OS2/Warp.

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KalRaist@reddit

Overkill. Maybe Lantastic?

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Randyguyishere@reddit

Used to use write the Btrieve database apps in Turbo Pascal!

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EViLTeW@reddit

Has anyone run across a business still using Novell NetWare?

Actual NetWare? Not in about 12-13 years. It's beyond EOL at this point.

OES/eDirectory? Yes. What is there to deal with? It's Linux (SLES) and an incredibly powerful/efficient directory server.

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ovirto@reddit

So you’re saying my CNE creds are still valuable?

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cdheer@reddit

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Aero077@reddit

Only with current experience...

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cheetahwilly@reddit

This thread is full of old people like me. I love it.

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pecheckler@reddit

Kill it with fire 🔥

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iPlayKeys@reddit

The things i remember was discovering that Novel “Search Drives” were a thing during migrations to Windows Server and when you actually had to pick what network protocol you wanted to use because some applications worked better with IPX/SPX or NetBUI or TCP/IP.

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vogelke@reddit

Some of this is Halo Effect. I remember our network center referring to it as "Novell Nightmare".

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flecom@reddit

We didn't know how much worse things could get... How is that line? The problem with the good old days is you don't know they were good till they are over or something like that

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voltagejim@reddit

We just got off it and Zenworks/Groupwise last year, county government if that tells you anything

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sakatan@reddit

That tells me everything, actually

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2_FluffyDogs@reddit

I miss Groupwise! Going on 9 years of Outlook BS and still pine for it.

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rcook55@reddit

I can still remember at my first real IT job the Sysadmin getting on the intercom to tell everyone "The system has ABENDED"... Ahh the good old days.

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amphion101@reddit

I did back in 2007.
I had to install TCP/IP drivers.

It took a lot of concurrency and planning. I can’t tell if it would be easier or harder now.

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waxwayne@reddit

Great tech and reliability compete with mercenary sales tactics and monopolies.

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OinkyConfidence@reddit

Ran into one still using Netware about 20 years ago. That was the last one I'd seen since 1999. Pretty sure it died when that particular business went under

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HandGrindMonkey@reddit

Wrapped up Zenworks and Netware server in 2020. Virtialized it just in case someone needed something.

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IamHydrogenMike@reddit

I worked at a community college back in the early aughts where we were replacing their token ring with Ethernet and Cisco everywhere. We found some random room that had a server running Netware on it that hadn't been rebooted in a couple of years. We decided to just shut it down to see who said anything, and it turned out to be a very important Netware server running everything for half of the community college. Someone set it up, never added it to the right inventory tracker and just forgot about it. I know several people who went through the hire, layoff, re-hire cycles they did at Novell and their severance packages were solid. They basically knew they were going to rehire you within 6 months and you were generally set for income during that time...

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OinkyConfidence@reddit

Dang!

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Stonewalled9999@reddit

I was supporting 3.12 and 4.something in 2006

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Potatus_Maximus@reddit

PTSD from some aspects of it, but man the permissions model and zenworks were far ahead of its time for simplicity. Too bad they couldn’t focus enough to properly adapt to NT, or they could’ve killed SMS which eventually became SCCM.

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HandGrindMonkey@reddit

I got PTSD from Vinca. Mirroring disks across a WAN, what could possibly go wrong!

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SRF1987@reddit

I’m not getting any use out of my Netware 4.11 certificate anymore?

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HandGrindMonkey@reddit

Saying that, at a recent interview, I bought this up. Had a laugh with the interviewer with this. Got the job. So, not directly using it, but there are key people that still remember.

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Superb_Raccoon@reddit

I became a sysadmin when one of the co owners of the business (PC build and repair) grabbed me, pulled parts from inventory (including 2 sick 15k 4GB Barracuda SCSI drives) and handed me a copy of NEtware 5.

"We need a new server, amd i dont have time to do it. You got a week to figure it out."

"But I get paid on sales."

"I will pay you a bonus of whatever the top sales guy makes. Deal?"

Yep. And it was done in three days. I started making $15 in 1994, just so he had time to grow the business.

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protogenxl@reddit

Run Away!

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loki03xlh@reddit

My first sysadmin job was a Netware/Zenworks environment. I sucked going from E-directory to AD.

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msalerno1965@reddit

I got 3.12 on floppies, you need a copy? With a ... wink wink ... 500-user SERVER.EXE on a separate disk? /s

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wjjeeper@reddit

I took it off my resume last year.

Haven't seen it in the wild in over a decade.

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qkdsm7@reddit

I'm confident that if they'd have embraced Linux as their core OS a few years sooner, they would have really been able to put up a fight.

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larryseltzer@reddit

It wouldn't run on any systems made in the last (probably) 15 years. And it had a monolithic driver, so you'd have to be running ancient networking hardware

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su_A_ve@reddit

We p2v them back in 2010 and finally pulled the plug on them in 2022 😀

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su_A_ve@reddit

Old life, we finally pulled the plug on 3 Netware 6.0 in early 2022.

But these were virtual servers. We p2v them back in 2010..

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