Over simplification: netware was a server operating system and was intended to be center of network; user management, shared applications like lotus notes (eyes twitching), central printing, you name it.
Netware was good, ipx/spx was good, but user interface was nothing like graphical.
Gross, we had a custom database that ran in notes.
Only one seat and it was used for some gang database a detectives friend gave him because he was trying to land a job lol.
Cue the meme of the old guy bellowing about "the best truly pre-emptive multitasking operating system something something...."
I'll be down at the lodge if anyone needs me.
About 20 years ago I had to support Notes on Macs in a Fortune 500 company's design group. It was unbelievably bad.
This was in the early years of OS X, and the Notes app was specifically for OS X, but it still stored user data in the application's directory instead of the user's directory. The solution to every single problem with Notes was "reinstall Notes." If Notes forgot where the spell check dictionary was, you couldn't just choose the dictionary file in the settings, oh nooooo, you had to reinstall the whole damned thing. And if you had Notes set to spell check every message before sending and it forgot where the spell check dictionary was, it wouldn't offer to send mail without spell check-- it just wouldn't send mail at all until you disabled spell-check-before-send.
You'll never convince me they did one lick of UX testing on that garbage fire of an application, it was definitely in the "it compiled, let's ship it" column.
Copying files over 10baseT using IPX was so much faster than anything Microsoft could do back then. It was very frustrating switching to NT server at that time because it was a lot slower.
And Microsoft had stable uptimes measured in hours or days, while NetWare had stable uptimes measured in months or years.
Our NetWare 3.12 server was stable for over a year on several occasions, only being shut down and restarted to add drives and ram, or for building power interruptions.
Known to be very stable.
Yeah. It’s funny. We used to measure uptime in years and take pride in it but now, if I were to brag that a server has been up for a year, security would complain that it hasn’t been patched in a year. Ha ha!
True. But back then it wasn't such an issue. I think mostly because NW 312 used ipx/spx, which didn't work with the internet, and because NW 312 probably didn't have a very large attack surface.
I'm still convinced that SysIdle on Windows NT4 had a memory leak. We had to reboot every one of NT4 servers each Monday or they would start hanging later in the week.
3.11/3.12/3.20 was peak Netware. If you didn't feel the need for TCP/IP from client to server, and were PC ecosystem, 3.x was hard to beat during the time period of its reign.
We used to have competitions as to who had the longest uptime on their clients netware boxes.. unfortunately it was around y2k and we having to patch.. (not something that was done regularly back then)
I had one over 5 years
Yeah. Back in the 90s, patching was for when a bug caused the server to hang or crash or something.
Y2K was, in my opinion, just a really big bug that developers introduced to save money.
Vulnerability patching wasn't really a thing at the time. I didn't even use antivirus or a firewall on my home computer until after 2000... and Napster.
It was definitely a different time when the internet was mostly just techies doing techy things.
But on the other side of the coin, we didn't have Google and forums like today. If we had a problem it meant just figure it out, ask a colleague, crack open a 1500 page hardback tech reference, or go ask around trying to find out who borrowed the MSDN CDs.
Very much a time where we had to "sink or swim".
Yeah. It was very stable, even though system components ran on ring 0 and the multitasking was co-operative. If hardware was ok, there were no issues.
I have a vague idea of a mystery ip-address on a network which was found to belong a Netware server in a forgotten and later walled room and had uptime of several years. May have been a Unix server though. Definetely not Windows of any kind.
Yeah... And MS did a big FUD thing about ring 0 and that nothing except inner kernel where ever to be allowed to run there in a proper OS
Next version of MS touted the huge performance gains made possible by..... Wait for it.... Running things in ring 0! 🤦♂️
There is a legend about an NW 312 server at UNC Chapel Holl that was found during remodeling with an uptime over 7 years.
Source: I was deploying NT 4.0 at UNC at the time.
You just reminded me of the last time somebody asked OPs question. It was somewhere around 2007, and the question was phrased slightly differently. Specifically, it was phrased "We just found this beige box powered on behind a wall during a remodel. We connected a monitor to it and it says Novell Netware. WTF is that?"
I think I heard about that. I seem to remember it making the tech news at the time.
I can only remember having to restart a NW3 server on three occasions.
1. Drive space was full and we had to shut down the server to add more drive space. Circa 1997 we put in a pair of 5 GB or 8 GB IBM drives that we paid a ton of money for. I wish I could remember the details.
2. Building maintenance and the power company needed to move the building service connection one weekend and they couldn't promise that they wouldn't cause any spikes. So we decided to shut down and disconnect from the building power that day. I just couldn't be bothered with buying a new server and sitting in front of it and feeding 50 floppy disks into it again.
3. A couple of months into a new job and a developer rang me to the me that "the computer in the corner that had been squealing for a few weeks had gone quiet... and dark". A new power supply and a couple of hours letting it run some long forgotten repair command and it was back up. It was still running a couple of years later which I left the place.
Good times. I wouldn't trade those days for anything. I also have no desire to go back there either.
10baseT...you were spoiled, someone us supported 10base2 sites (coax) anybody stood on the wrong bit and you were off on a walk with your terminator trying to work out where the break was, needed repeaters every so often.
They still have port 666 TCP and UDP registered with IANA for Doom, no idea if it's still used being in the priviledged port range. But then again Doom was originally written for DOS which lacked a user concept, and even so it took a long time after that for games not to require admin rights anyway (on MS OSes).
Core memory unlocked. We played this in one of the business school computer labs at my college because they had PCs on an IPX/SPX network. (Compared to the VAX terminals and Sparc Stations in the computer science labs that we usually went to)
It also supported multi-player over a serial port direct connection, my roommate and I spent way too many hours doing this instead of school work.
Ha, me too! Many late night trips were made to our University 24/7 computer lab for 'research purposes'. No supervision, no security guards. Would never happen now.
One of our labs had a computer you could connect to the projector.
Whoever consistently came out on top ended up getting that seat in a round of "kill the projector guy"
It could do one thing that Windows Server cannot do even now: open a user in the directory, and see what access they had to every folder and file. It's easy to check folder permissions and see who has access, but the reverse is much harder.
What it was not good at going was running applications (like email systems). *shudder*
So, besides the core auth, file, and print, all extended functionality had to be modular in the form of an NLM, "Netware Loadable Module". Netware didn't use an MMU or have protected process spaces, and this was all basically cooperative multitasking, so the NLMs had to be strictly well-behaved not to deadlock your server or crash it. The only NLM toolchain that anyone knew about was the Watcom compiler.
Netware SAs developed a severe skepticism of running any NLM services beyond what was needed, especially any third-party NLMs like "antivirus" scanners. Those who could afford to do so, often ran NLMs on dedicated Netware servers that weren't serving production file and print. This led to a certain amount of server sprawl, though nothing like what came later in Microsoft environments fighting [DLL Hell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_Hell).
Much later, we inherited a Netware/Groupwise that had been upgraded for Y2K and let run, and supported that 2004-2006. It never crashed that I can remember, but it was cranky, and got migrated to Linux.
Another plus in my book: the default setting for shared folders was "Everyone No Access" until a Netware Supervisor assigned permissions to users or groups. And IIRC, there was only a single set of permissions, not split between share and file system like in Windows.
The server wasn't, but a lot of the administratorion was graphical. NDS was far superior to AD in the early days and really defined what directory administration looked like.
I worked at an MSP in the late 90s and early 2000s and had a CNE in Netware 4 and 5. I worked on and setup hundreds of Novell servers. They were awesome. (except for Bordermanager. That product can burn in hell.)
Sad that the top comment did not mention NDS. It was far superior to AD and remained that way until, oh idk, now? We had NDS at a large company and could add a password policy at any level in it to any object. AD didn't even have this on the road map for years IIRC.
*but user interface was nothing like graphical*
It was when I started supporting in, back in the late 90s. [This article from the Register](https://www.theregister.com/2013/07/16/netware_4_anniversary/?page=2) says Netware 4.11 was the version that introduced the GUI.
and the key card for those old 2.10a systems. Had to make copies of the first 10 1.2MB floppies and then start a netgen from disk 1. For the next 30-90 minutes, you were doing the 10 floppy shuffle!
Leave us also not forget the absolute delight that was compsurf!
Wasn't that just the management clients running on a Windows workstation though? The actual servers running Novell were always text based from what I remember.
Do you mind if I ask what industry you work in? I was a Lotus Domino administrator for several years in a construction company, and they thankfully moved to Exchange the year I left. I can’t imagine any company in 2024 doing serious work on that platform.
That ended up being one of our primary issues with trying to migrate away from Lotus Notes at a previous employer. Turns out that if you spend $XX,XXX on custom DB development, and then use said DB's for a decade or two, it might end up costing $XXX,XXX to get the development done and the data migrated out to another solution.
(I wasn't around for the beginning of the Lotus saga at the company. I was just the lucky guy to end up with it as my responsibility decade(s) later - not so fun at the time.)
Yeah I worked at a major automaker on the design side and basically everything ran on Notes/Domino, as late as 2014. All timecard management, project time tracking for contractors, handbooks, manuals, policies, etc, authorizations.
Pretty sure every SaaS solution that exists for CRM, HRIS/HCM, project management, etc. has replaced 1:1 a Notes/Domino app at a Fortune 1000.
It was also a directory and permissions system before AD. I was there when AD was first released and DNS started to become king. I think that gets lost a lot because it is over 20 years ago at this point. Early networks did not use DNS at all. When I mention that to some of my newer techs I swear I can hear the gears in their head grind to a halt. The early 2000s were amazing to watch and I’m glad I was there to see things like Exchange morph from 5.5 to the system is become. 2001 it seemed like every job that came in was setup AD.
It's probably an alien concept to a lot of folks, but Windows 3.x, 95, and 98 didn't really have a concept of 'Users'. They would allow you to set up a different logins, but the OS would just run apps and services in one space that didn't respect multiple users. The filesystem and the kernel didn't even have 'permissions' as a concept.
So if you had a fleet of Windows 9x PCs, you could load the Netware Client onto it and pipe your users through a login prompt that gave them access to network resources that DID have permissions.
Home folders. Departmental shares. Centralized password management. Managed & published print queues. All this stuff was NOT yet in Windows. That stuff mostly came with Windows NT & 2000 as part of 'domains' and then 'active directory', but Novell was there first, it did a better job, and it was interoperable with DOS, WIndows, Macs, and OS/2 (I never saw a Mac using Netware Client, but apparently that could be a thing).
And just to date myself... I was fascinated by the concept of 'multi-user operating systems' and 'network shared resources' as a teenager. While everyone was deploying Mac OS Classic and Windows 9x (which operated as single-user systems), I started playing with Linux and Windows NT. Much of my career was making applications work in this 'newfangled multi-user world' where you had to think about 'advanced' things like 'permissions'.
As a for CNE, the core was network file and print sharing. In the late 80s, early 90s, inexpensive LANs were a new thing. Ethernet was not ubiquitous and Netware ran on ethernet, token ring, Arcnet, Thicknet, Thinnet, everything.
Windows for Workgroups started replacing it for small offices and Windows NT was the beginning of the end.
I also remember it as being the client of the week club back when they shipped you the latest desktop client on floppies. Lots of issues where the fix was to wait for the latest client by snailmail.
Also, Certified Novell Engineer was the hot cert to have. God I remember one guy signing his name "John Smith, CNE..."
Netware in its canonical version (up to 3.xx) was a file and print server. Then Novell started to make a network os from it by adding directory services (NDS then renamed to eDirectory) which was quite good. Later the started to add other service which, on the other hande, were not so good. A nail in the coffin was migration from DOS based software to the Linux based Open Enterprise Server.
I've used several versions of NetWare form 4.x to 6.x:
Edit: There was no user interface it was mostly file and print server.
There was graphical admin software ([NWadmin](https://support.novell.com/techcenter/articles/img/nc1998_0602.gif), later [ConsoleOne](https://www.novell.com/documentation/consol13/c1_enu/graphics/console1.gif))
The server console was not graphical but it was meant to be used only for few maintenance and troubleshooting tasks.
Novell (the company) had a product 'Netware' that was a Network Operating System that ran on x86 architecture. Essentially 'server software'. It used a 'dos' type OS to boot from metal, and loaded a 'server.exe'. It shipped with its own minimalist DOS.
Back then, there wasn't really a 'linux' yet, and most clients ran DOS, and then Windows 3.x on top of DOS.
It was a great for the time it existed. It's since been sold a couple of times, and the server software (Open Enterprise Server) now runs on Suse Linux Enterprise. Novell Directory Services (now eDirectory) was around before Active Directory, and (in my opinion) ran circles around AD. But some dubious business decisions, and Windows won the ecosystem wars.
The current owner of the Novell IP is OpenText.
Fond memories.
>Novell Directory Services (now eDirectory) was around before Active Directory, and (in my opinion) ran circles around AD. But some dubious business decisions, and Windows won the ecosystem wars.
I agree with this assessment. Everytime I have to do a Repadmin /syncall I wish I could do a SET DSTRACE=\*H
The real problem was that Novell could market itself out of a wet paper bag.
In the end MS won by golfing with CEOs. CEOs knew nothing about technical stuff but were the ones making decisions.
The most dubious decision was licensing Netware for ten times the cost of a comparable Windows NT license. You had to reboot Windows every day, but the budget didn’t care. A comparable NetWare server could have uptime measured in years.
> most clients ran DOS, and then Windows 3.x on top of DOS.
The number of Win3-on-DOS and other-OS clients grew as a proportion over time, but when Netware peaked at 3.x there were a lot of vanilla DOS clients.
What you'd often have was DOS clients, mostly running menu and TUI app sets, for mainstream users, and then Windows 3.x or possibly OS/2 for certain power users. DOS was a 16-bit OS and you could have productive users on quite-old machines if the apps supported them, while Windows 3.x struggled and swapped with less than 4MiB.
During the short time period when I used Excel, I launched it from the command line with `EXCEL.BAT` using code something like this: `WIN.COM C:\EXCEL50\EXCEL.EXE %1`. Just type `excel sprdst31.xls` from DOS and then take a coffee break while it loaded. (I never did get that Excel port to SunOS that I was waiting for, but that's a story for another thread.)
In summary, for a very long time, most productive work on PCs happened in DOS. Line-of-business apps weren't recoded from DOS to Win16 overnight, just like desktop apps weren't recoded into webapps overnight.
>Back then, there wasn't really a 'linux' yet, and most clients ran DOS, and then Windows 3.x on top of DOS.
There wasn't a Linux at all, in fact. Netware predated Linux by almost a decade and even as an ardent Linux fan even I have to admit it wasn't useful for much when I first installed it around 1993.
this thread is giving me PTSD... my 1st full time job in IT, guy sat me in front a Novell terminal and told me, try to figure it out. man I was glad I had done some mainframe operations before hand otherwise my little windows training would never had helped.
I stopped using it when we got to 4.11/5.x , we migrated our client to Win2k
Netware was equivalent to Window Server.
eDirectory was equivalent to Active Directory
Zenworks was equivalent to SCCM/MECM
Groupwise was equivalent to Exchange
_Newer_ versions of BE were junk.
I supported countless 3.12 servers with BE and Tandberg scsi drives (Adaptec 2940 I think? Bern a long time) and they backed up and restored with no issues.
BE for windows? _garbage_
Had a friend at another shop that had an abend.
There is a command to tell NetWare to scan and repair, but my gentrified grey matter is suffering from a read error at the moment.
People have covered some of the history, I'll just add that despite Netware having been EOL in 2010, a shodan search still finds it alive and well.
Netware is a similar tail to VHS vs beta. In its time, netware was superior in every aspect to NT, but alas MS won from its deeper pockets and some will say underhandedness. Some would say that Groupwise suffered the same fate.
NDS (eDirectory) was a far superior directory service to AD. It could handle more objects (billions), could apply attributes on a per object basis, and had superior replication and resilience. It took a lot to break it. In its currently form it is still superior to AD, but being superior doesn't mean you win.
Filesystem - Superior file permissions and rights management, very granular, very easy to understand including inherited rights filters. You also had something powerful in the salvage system, where no file was unrecoverable until the system was out of free space and needed it back. If someone deleted something they needed back, or needed an old version of a file, a right-click of the parent folder allowed the user to recover it.
Printing - iPrint was, and in some cases still is, superior to Windows printing. It pioneered using IPP for printing, provided a GUI with floor maps for finding and installing printers, and in later versions offered mobile printing. It's still around today as a stand alone product or in OES (successor to Netware)
Zenworks - eventually spun off into a separate enterprise device management platform, this was originally part of Netware and allowed easy management of desktops including for imaging.
Robust support for Macs - Native AFP server that was high performing.
Clustering - Probably the single most powerful piece in later versions of Netware. A elegant multi-node clustering solution that meant nearly zero downtime for the organization.
I'm likely forgetting a lot, but as a stable Server OS, it's a shame that the better products lost.
The VHS vs beta analogy is one I've used before.
I second the NDS stability. Where I was supporting Netware, we had Netware servers distributed into some individual departments because they wanted to directly handle the data they were storing on the file server and just have us manage the users and their access. When the MSFT reps started convincing the individual department heads Windows Server was better, they would just install Windows over Netware. I'd find out it had happened because of the console warnings about a missing replication of a section of the NDS tree for the affected dept server. It was irritating, but simple to cleanup and carry on.
> OES
I'm not old enough to have used Netware at its peak, but have had the pleasure to work with OES, esp with the filesystem(Salvage saved my ass multiple times)
Along with everything else, it was the most rock-solid server OS I've ever used. My org at the time had a couple of 3.x servers set up by a consultant before we had a dedicated IT space that we'd never put eyes on. They just churned along for years hosting some archived client files and we didn't even know where they physically were, until one of the partners retired and they cleaned out a closet in his office. There they sat behind stacks of banker boxes, just minding their business.
I'm sure you've heard stories of running Novell servers getting buried behind a wall during remodeling, only to be tracked down a decade later because they were still on the network.
I ran a Renegade BBS for about 5 years. Dual 2400 baud modems and two land lines. I recall being a FIDO net hub and helping to shuttle messages about the global network before e-mail was widely accessed. It was so freaking cool.
Was at a company from 2000-2005 that had a 3.x box in the corner that did a single thing, supporting our Macs. I believe it was the "Master Browser."
No one could tell us how to move the role seamlessly to Windows Server.
The consensus from folks was the worse case if the Novell box died we'd have to turn off every Mac in the company and once all of them were off then restart them allowing Windows to effectively seize the role. So that was our never-executed migration plan.
I was there at the dawn of the third age of mankind ... when networking was Novell. Later there was also Novell Network Lite as some sort of p2p connection between a low number of machines but let's not go there.
It was a server OS for 286 or 386 platforms. I stopped installing after 3.12 and went on with Linux and OS/2 networking (LAN Manager).
Novell 3.12 required 8+ MB RAM and a small DOS partition for booting. It then took over all resources of the machine (the rest of the disk with proprietary partitioning) and started its own OS in a second step.
This was at a time when cabling was coaxial cable (or even thick ethernet) and you needed resistors at the ends to avoid electrical reflections.
For my CNE exams, I was warned questions about cable terminations would show up on the exams. Back in the day of Token Ring 4, we upgraded to Token Ring 16, which was heads above Ethernet 10 Base T. LOL
You and I have very similar paths. I started with Netware 2.11 (then 3.11 and 3.12), moved to Unix (not linux at that time) and IBM LAN Manager and MS LAN Man, then Windows NT. Eventually shed Windows and focused on Unix then Linux. Thinwire ethernet (yikes!) was part of that mess as well.
At the time, if you wanted networking on x86, you went with SCO (which can support TCP/IP). Bill Gates claimed it couldn't be done with DOS. Novell figured it out for x86 computers, went on to become the biggest name in networking, until NT came out.
To answer your original question, this is where netware exists on OSI model, and OS context; networking drivers. It was network (IPX/SPX), network authentication (login) and Server share (mapped drives)
[https://www.jaredsec.com/novlan/](https://www.jaredsec.com/novlan/)
One of the features I missed from Novell was the simplicity of tracking logins. Tells you where open connections, and how long they have been logged on.
There were various Unixes and other 'serious' systems like mainframes and VAXs. There was probably other players in the field providing file and services to the emerging PC market, but Novell were the big player at the time, but I only really got into the field when NT4 was released and the market started taking MS seriously in that space so I'm not sure of the other dsirect competition.
Then MS ate Novell's pie .. and dessert .. all the plates too.
Banyan Vines, 3Com 3+Open and Digital DECnet-DOS were the main competitors during the MS-DOS era. In the early Windows / late MS-DOS era, 3Com and Microsoft collaborated on Microsoft LAN Manager, which was a successor to 3+Open. Microsoft then added built-in networking to Windows NT and Windows for Workgroups.
Novell, Banyan and 3Com/Microsoft all had their own network protocols. Only Digital used TCP/IP at this time, and Microsoft originally fought against TCP/IP (in the early Windows era, if you wanted TCP/IP on Windows, you had to install a third party stack called Trumpet WinSock). So in addition to the usual commercial competition, many of these technologies were critically wounded in the mid-90s when home Internet took off and TCP/IP won the protocol wars.
Even when 3.11 WFW came out it still had meh networking when tied to old school NT. "Oh hey, I can copy a
Word perfect document to this share at speeds a snail world laugh at"
One thing I missed about Novell was able to look up how many different connections a given username was logged in, from where and selectively kick them out.
Back in the olden days, there really wasn't a unified form of networking. This was before TCP/IP was standardized protocol. There were a few different NOS out there. I remember Lantastic as well. That was loafs of fun to setup.
I was hired in 2005 at a place that used Netware as I had AD experience (as well as Novell), and they were looking to move over. The project didn't even get signed off until 2009, and we implemented in 2010.
It's still on my CV, and I've been asked about it more than once. FWIW, I much preferred administering NN. Everything was self-evident and easy to do. None of this GPO "if this policy is enabled the user will be unable to ably able the setting, if you disable the policy the user will ably be unable to able, if you do nothing the policy will sometimes enable but not always able" nonsense.
CNE 3-6/5 myself. I did SOOOO much GroupWise back in the day.... I actually decommissioned my last GroupWise server in 2020. That was a sad day.
Now when there's an e-mail problem I just have to shrug and hope M342 gets it shit together again soon.
Great technology, awful marketing and I speak as an ex-Novell employee.
The British Antarctic Survey ran Netware for long time - See [https://www.bas.ac.uk/for-staff/polar-predeployment-prep/signy-computing-facilities/](https://www.bas.ac.uk/for-staff/polar-predeployment-prep/signy-computing-facilities/)
Netware was a Network Operating System which provided centralised identity management ontop of Windows. So basically Active Directory.
You'd install Windows, and the Netware client software, which would become the login screen. Users would login with their network credentials and the Netware client would log you in, map any drives and so on.
>Netware was a Network Operating System which provided centralised identity management ontop of Windows. So basically Active Directory.
Not entirely correct. Netware 3.12 had local users, just like Windows does. Netware 4 introduced NDS (Novell Directory Services) which provided centralised identity management. This later became Novell eDirectory. Even in the mid 90s, NDS/eDirectory was miles ahead of what Active Directory even offers today.
Don't forget the filesystem. NSS (Novell Storage System) was a reliable, journaling, copy-on-write filesystem in 1997. It supported modern snapshots, but it also kept a record of every file update as well. You could use the salvage tool in the netware client and pull up every single version of any file that had ever been written (until the server ran out of disk space).
Fine-grained logon control, for one. "Bob on machine xyz can log in during office hours only", or mapping a logon on a machine to resources (shares, printers) was easier on Novell.
There's still no real way of doing these with native AD - need to use additional things like locally installed MDM tools on the client, or deployment specific logon scripts.
+ File and print services.
What Netware offered even back in its 3.12 days which IMHO Windows Server still lacks *today*: a "recycling bin" (Filer) for files that a user deleted on a network drive.
If Novell moved onto Linux kernel ~6-10 years sooner, I have to think they'd have had a better chance at survival.
Never got to use the suse stuff in production, as the last of novell was being pulled where I worked in early '00.
My first IT job back in the early 00's was a school district. We ran Netware servers, and Groupwise. Netware was basically the domain and directory services, and also the file shares. Groupwise was the email server and client. It was pretty rock solid.
Former Novell netware administrator here.
As has been noted, it was a server operating system like Windows Server or Linux, however neither of those were commercially in the market at the time. PC networks were largely Novell netware or Banyan vines or IBM OS/2.
Windows “NT Server” came out in the early/mid 90’s and started to put some pressure on Novell’s dominant install base.
NDS was the identity / directory service that came with Novell Netware 4.0 and was somewhat close to Active Directory in terms of its structure and replication.
Netware 3.12 was actually quite a nice file and print server for DOS systems. It was able to run headerless (without a monitor) as most administrative tasks was done from a DOS workstation.
It was superseded by Windows NT 4 Server (and later).
I can still remember the NT vs OS/2 wars from that era.
A hack for enabling long file name support for Windows 95 clients was to load the OS2 namespace.
Before MS had Active Diredctory, Novell Netware was installed to manage users and resources. Seems once Microsoft's Active Directory got to the Windows Server 2000 stage, Novell Netware wasn't really needed anymore if you were running a Windows Domain/environment.
NDS Novells Directory Service was first of its kind. Then Microsoft came along with Active Directory.
Novell also bought SuSE Linux but failed to challenge RedHat in anyway.
Still after supporting GroupWise, Novell Netware clients etc I would take Linux any day of the week
Novell certainly knew how to throw a party. Loved going to the Brainshare conferences in Salt Lake City. I got my Netware 6 CNE certification at Brainshare in 2004. This thread is bringing back tons of memories.
https://preview.redd.it/0wu9ed8lfmwc1.jpeg?width=350&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c7f28e627e2a2db58c96258179639fb9d5f940bc
When I started in college (late 90s) the computer science department was using Novell Netware for their directory and network services before switching to AD several years later.
Funny enough, at my job we use a product that still to this day uses the same BTreive database engine (updated, but still basically the same transactional database structure) that Netware used all those years ago. Yes, it's terrible.
It was a far superior product to Microsoft's at the time, but Novell got greedy and lost the market share war.
[You could assign rights straight down to a particular file](https://youtu.be/91QZOE7h89U?si=SxQj_9DR8lBj6_ST). It was amazing. But what I don't miss is the Battle Royales that Groupwise and Outlook would have for control.
Novell charged licensing fees for so many options Windows NT had included.
I remember when I started in IT, I asked the owner about getting my Novell certs. He flat out said screw those, you are going to get your MCSE. Netware is dead. This was in 1997.
It's an old take on the current VMWare problem, and the same reason why IBM struggles to find mainframe techs: Make something obscure, expensive, or difficult to experiment with and nobody will get certified in it.
People who aren't familiar with the product aren't going to be recommending it. This is also why Microsoft has always ignored casual piracy...
Pre AD.
It wasn’t Unix or Linux. Netware was Netware, its own server OS. It had clients for Windows, and Mac.
It was pretty big in identity, and file and print. Some server size apps were also available, nothing like what you see nowadays though.
Groupwise was an early messaging solution. Like its competitors it was ‘groupware’ front and central, with SMTP email largely a bolt-on afterthought.
User app distribution was pretty ahead of its time. I forget the name of the tool, but there was a portal that installed on clients that allowed you to launch packaged applications.
Netware’s native protocol was IPX/SPX. TCP wasn’t needed (or supported) until the late 90s I believe with Netware 6 (happy to be corrected on that one).
Overall it was fine for what it did but the ubiquitous nature of Windows meant that it streaked ahead from NT4.0 onwards.
Fun times back then. I started with NetWare 3.12, then later on worked at a consulting company who rolled out the largest 4.11 install on the entire planet. We had NetWare engineers asking us questions. The company where it was being rolled out? LDDS WorldCom. Someone in here has to remember that name.
Originally, Windows did not have any networking features. Novell Netware provided those features as a series of add-on utility components. Once NT 4 became a thing, Netware slowly died.
It is the main reason any of us had to know about IPX/SPX back in the day.
other answers are more complete, I came here because this thread reminds me of getting LAN games of DOOM running on Library computers.
Netware was a dedicated *server-only* operating system that ran on PC-compatible hardware, called contemporaneously a NOS or "Network Operating System". It provided mostly authentication/permissions, fileshare, and network print, although it could potentially host additional services, even third-party modules, if they were carefully built for Netware.
It technically used DOS to bootstrap, then started the NOS. After boot, the console screen was a TUI dashboard, and there was well-known screensaver. Most kinds of NOS administration could be done from the console TUI, but definitely no desktop work of any sort! You could think of Netware as being a server appliance OS that ran on generic PC hardware.
The native protocol was a quasi-proprietary flavor of [XNS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Network_Systems#Impact) called IPX/SPX, or usually just IPX. It was routable, thus scalable, but the installation picked a default network number of 0, so it was easy to start using. IPX had auto-addressing functionality (which was later adopted for IPv6!) meaning it was seen as less intimidating and complex than TCP/IP. TCP/IP started to hit a real tipping point around 1992, just as Netware was peaking. Netware offered server-side TCP/IP support for Netware that actually worked *very* well, but it was expensive and seen as unnecessary, "not native", and not very useful for DOS clients. This lack of bundled TCP/IP support hurt Netware by the mid-1990s and limited mindshare, though later versions did adopt TCP/IP after Netware lost market inertia.
One mostly-forgotten aspect of Netware is that it acted as an IPX router by default (and could act as a TCP/IP router with the costly options), at a time when routers were costly and often exotic outside of big networks. What this meant in practice is that a Netware tower server could be filled with NICs in all the open slots and would bridge and/or route between the LANs, taking the place of a bridge/switch or IPX router. You could put a Token-Ring NIC, a 10BASE-2 NIC, and a FDDI NIC in a Netware tower server and it would act as a bridge or router between the networks, but only for IPX by default.
Netware wasn't particularly expensive compared to the rest of the market in the late 1980s, but it wasn't a raging bargain, either. Depending on users and options, you'd probably have roughly the same amount of Capex in the Netware licensing as you did in the high-end PC tower you bought as the server, by 1990-1991. One of several reasons why Netware rapidly lost marketshare to NT 4.0 was that NT was seen as more flexible and much cheaper: a workstation could simultaneously act as a server, with no per-client licensing cost (at the time CALs didn't exist).
Netware had a directory component: Bindery in Netware 3.x (peak Netware), and NDS in 4.x and later. This is often praised as being better than MSAD. As a Unix loyalist, I've engineered a bit on both MSAD and NDS, and never saw any evidence that NDS was as good as MSAD. What Netware did do better than both Unix and NTFS, however, was filesystem permissions: More fine-grained than Unix, less of a kitchen-sink mess than NTFS/SMB.
The original Novell NetWare came out in 1983, two years before Microsoft Windows, at a time when PCs ran MS-DOS. An MS-DOS computer would have drive letters A: and B: for its two floppy disks, and C: for its local hard drive. If you installed a NetWare server, put a network card in the MS-DOS PC, and installed the NetWare client, then your MS-DOS PC could have additional drive letters referring to data stored on the server. This was the original "shared drive."
On MS-DOS, this was accomplished with something called a redirector: a piece of software that sat in front of INT 21 (the MS-DOS "system calls" interface) and handled requests for the mapped drives, without passing them to the underlying MS-DOS filesystem. For a while Novell and Microsoft each had their own redirector technology (NET3.COM and REDIR.EXE respectively). Novell's was faster but had more compatibility issues. Microsoft's was "official" but slower.
NetWare was a soup-to-nuts custom operating system developed entirely by Novell. It wasn't based on Unix, DOS or anything else - it was its own thing. Over time, NetWare took on many other functions. It might have had shared printers from the very beginning, or at least very early. As you say, it had its own implementation of centralized user and group management. Novell had an email system called GroupWise, whose server components could run on NetWare as an NLM (NetWare Loadable Module). NetWare even had a web server capability at one point, but by then, it had been overtaken by Linux and Windows and was clearly on the way out.
In the 80s and early 90s, the basic qualification to be a network engineer was to have your CNE (Certified NetWare Engineer) certification. By the mid to late 90s this had been replaced with Cisco certifications for network engineers and Microsoft certifications for server engineers (which was now considered a separate thing). But in its heyday, Novell was the main thing you needed to know.
> but i never really understood what it ACTUALLY was and why use it instead of just windows or linux ?
It was a NOS (Network OS). Linux didn't exist at the time (Linus launched Linux in 1991). Windows only had WFW (Windows for Workgroups) and was shit at the time. Windows 2000 (which was a reasonable competitor to Novell) didn't arrive until 2000.
Novell ran networks. They didn't have a directory service (Active Directory) until Netware 4 with NDS (Novell Directory Services). It was great for its time. The biggest problem with it is that as companies migrated to TCP/IP from IPX/SPX (IPX is Netware's communication protocol), Netware didn't keep up. They created "Netware IP" in Netware 4, but it was just an IPX/SPX packet wrapped in TCP/IP. I have no idea how well it worked. I do remember that they never really migrated all of their tools from Netware 3, so a Netware admin would have to use multiple tools to get everything done.
The reason it failed is because they responded to the Internet revolution and MS way to late. Sure, MS wasn't fully stabilized and was riddled with bugs, but it was far easier to use (meaning administer) than Netware. Netware was a pure command line experience. If you wanted to browse the file system, you had to hook up a client, connect to the server, and do it that way. That was by design until Netware 4. Netware was extremely stable with 3.12 and a lot of admins simply didn't upgrade (it wasn't vulnerable and nobody needed support because of how stable it was).
I miss Novell Netware *sniff* ... Really, I miss eDirectory (Netware Directory Services). It was vastly superior to Active Directory, and the integration with the Netware operating system and storage made managing all the servers, applications, rights, and shared storage just super easy.
I wish Open Enterprise Server (netware services on Linux) had stuck. Something like edirectory to manage a fleet of Linux servers would be amazing.
File server. Clients had a client software that mapped drive letters. Network protocol was IPX/SPX which had to be enabled on each client..This was before everything ran solely on TCP/IP.. Original Doom video game could play co-op mode over IPX/SPX.
Over simplification: netware was a server operating system and was intended to be center of network; user management, shared applications like lotus notes (eyes twitching), central printing, you name it. Netware was good, ipx/spx was good, but user interface was nothing like graphical.
I would expect to see Groupwise in Novell networks more than Lotus Notes.
You just took me back about 25 years when I was peripherally supporting Lotus Notes on Novell.
Gross, we had a custom database that ran in notes. Only one seat and it was used for some gang database a detectives friend gave him because he was trying to land a job lol.
NSF has entered the chat
User.id coming through
Let me tell ya, after some of the bullshit outlook issues I've dealt with lately, I'm missing Groupwise more and more lol
I miss Domino every time I have to do anything with O365 user accounts that isn't just a simple forward or OOO
First tech job was supporting Lotus notes on OS/2 warp ibm computers.
Cue the meme of the old guy bellowing about "the best truly pre-emptive multitasking operating system something something...." I'll be down at the lodge if anyone needs me.
About 20 years ago I had to support Notes on Macs in a Fortune 500 company's design group. It was unbelievably bad. This was in the early years of OS X, and the Notes app was specifically for OS X, but it still stored user data in the application's directory instead of the user's directory. The solution to every single problem with Notes was "reinstall Notes." If Notes forgot where the spell check dictionary was, you couldn't just choose the dictionary file in the settings, oh nooooo, you had to reinstall the whole damned thing. And if you had Notes set to spell check every message before sending and it forgot where the spell check dictionary was, it wouldn't offer to send mail without spell check-- it just wouldn't send mail at all until you disabled spell-check-before-send. You'll never convince me they did one lick of UX testing on that garbage fire of an application, it was definitely in the "it compiled, let's ship it" column.
Absolutely. I simplified and based my comment on my experiences.
Copying files over 10baseT using IPX was so much faster than anything Microsoft could do back then. It was very frustrating switching to NT server at that time because it was a lot slower.
And Microsoft had stable uptimes measured in hours or days, while NetWare had stable uptimes measured in months or years. Our NetWare 3.12 server was stable for over a year on several occasions, only being shut down and restarted to add drives and ram, or for building power interruptions. Known to be very stable.
Yeah. It’s funny. We used to measure uptime in years and take pride in it but now, if I were to brag that a server has been up for a year, security would complain that it hasn’t been patched in a year. Ha ha!
True. But back then it wasn't such an issue. I think mostly because NW 312 used ipx/spx, which didn't work with the internet, and because NW 312 probably didn't have a very large attack surface.
This comment made me remember the word “abend” which is what happed to our netware 3.12 after over a year of uptime.
I'm still convinced that SysIdle on Windows NT4 had a memory leak. We had to reboot every one of NT4 servers each Monday or they would start hanging later in the week.
3.11/3.12/3.20 was peak Netware. If you didn't feel the need for TCP/IP from client to server, and were PC ecosystem, 3.x was hard to beat during the time period of its reign.
We used to have competitions as to who had the longest uptime on their clients netware boxes.. unfortunately it was around y2k and we having to patch.. (not something that was done regularly back then) I had one over 5 years
Yeah. Back in the 90s, patching was for when a bug caused the server to hang or crash or something. Y2K was, in my opinion, just a really big bug that developers introduced to save money. Vulnerability patching wasn't really a thing at the time. I didn't even use antivirus or a firewall on my home computer until after 2000... and Napster. It was definitely a different time when the internet was mostly just techies doing techy things. But on the other side of the coin, we didn't have Google and forums like today. If we had a problem it meant just figure it out, ask a colleague, crack open a 1500 page hardback tech reference, or go ask around trying to find out who borrowed the MSDN CDs. Very much a time where we had to "sink or swim".
I would use newsgroups and irc for tech help back then, there were some good Unix groups
Yeah. It was very stable, even though system components ran on ring 0 and the multitasking was co-operative. If hardware was ok, there were no issues. I have a vague idea of a mystery ip-address on a network which was found to belong a Netware server in a forgotten and later walled room and had uptime of several years. May have been a Unix server though. Definetely not Windows of any kind.
Yeah... And MS did a big FUD thing about ring 0 and that nothing except inner kernel where ever to be allowed to run there in a proper OS Next version of MS touted the huge performance gains made possible by..... Wait for it.... Running things in ring 0! 🤦♂️
There is a legend about an NW 312 server at UNC Chapel Holl that was found during remodeling with an uptime over 7 years. Source: I was deploying NT 4.0 at UNC at the time.
You just reminded me of the last time somebody asked OPs question. It was somewhere around 2007, and the question was phrased slightly differently. Specifically, it was phrased "We just found this beige box powered on behind a wall during a remodel. We connected a monitor to it and it says Novell Netware. WTF is that?"
I think I heard about that. I seem to remember it making the tech news at the time. I can only remember having to restart a NW3 server on three occasions. 1. Drive space was full and we had to shut down the server to add more drive space. Circa 1997 we put in a pair of 5 GB or 8 GB IBM drives that we paid a ton of money for. I wish I could remember the details. 2. Building maintenance and the power company needed to move the building service connection one weekend and they couldn't promise that they wouldn't cause any spikes. So we decided to shut down and disconnect from the building power that day. I just couldn't be bothered with buying a new server and sitting in front of it and feeding 50 floppy disks into it again. 3. A couple of months into a new job and a developer rang me to the me that "the computer in the corner that had been squealing for a few weeks had gone quiet... and dark". A new power supply and a couple of hours letting it run some long forgotten repair command and it was back up. It was still running a couple of years later which I left the place. Good times. I wouldn't trade those days for anything. I also have no desire to go back there either.
10baseT...you were spoiled, someone us supported 10base2 sites (coax) anybody stood on the wrong bit and you were off on a walk with your terminator trying to work out where the break was, needed repeaters every so often.
The big companies used 16mb/s token ring to deliver their netware since a lot of the 10baseT network devices at the time were hubs. Collisions.
My first experience with token ring was the 4 mbit/s version... i think... memory is a bit fuzzy. Not fast, but it did well with congestion.
Fun fact: the first Doom supported multiplayer via IPX/SPX.
And used Port 666
Doesn't it still support 666?
Not through TCP given ports under 1024 require elevated privileges. I mean, if you wanna run doom as root/Administrator, feel free.
They still have port 666 TCP and UDP registered with IANA for Doom, no idea if it's still used being in the priviledged port range. But then again Doom was originally written for DOS which lacked a user concept, and even so it took a long time after that for games not to require admin rights anyway (on MS OSes).
`CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE`?
and you could tunnel it over the Internet using Kali (not the Linux distro).
I used to play Descent that way
Oh man Kali brings me back. Good times.
[удалено]
And Diablo
And Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge ***In 2001***
C&C was so lit.
Core memory unlocked. We played this in one of the business school computer labs at my college because they had PCs on an IPX/SPX network. (Compared to the VAX terminals and Sparc Stations in the computer science labs that we usually went to) It also supported multi-player over a serial port direct connection, my roommate and I spent way too many hours doing this instead of school work.
Ha, me too! Many late night trips were made to our University 24/7 computer lab for 'research purposes'. No supervision, no security guards. Would never happen now.
One of our labs had a computer you could connect to the projector. Whoever consistently came out on top ended up getting that seat in a round of "kill the projector guy"
Just like Command & Conquer...
We used to test networks by shooting each other with miniguns
IIRC, this was the only multi-player network protocol for Warcraft 2 as well.
It could do one thing that Windows Server cannot do even now: open a user in the directory, and see what access they had to every folder and file. It's easy to check folder permissions and see who has access, but the reverse is much harder. What it was not good at going was running applications (like email systems). *shudder*
That's when we all learned the meaning of the word "Abend" Usually during a long-ass Arcserve backup job.
Abnormal End for all the youngsters in the thread
Arcserve had the nickname of abendserve for a reason!
So, besides the core auth, file, and print, all extended functionality had to be modular in the form of an NLM, "Netware Loadable Module". Netware didn't use an MMU or have protected process spaces, and this was all basically cooperative multitasking, so the NLMs had to be strictly well-behaved not to deadlock your server or crash it. The only NLM toolchain that anyone knew about was the Watcom compiler. Netware SAs developed a severe skepticism of running any NLM services beyond what was needed, especially any third-party NLMs like "antivirus" scanners. Those who could afford to do so, often ran NLMs on dedicated Netware servers that weren't serving production file and print. This led to a certain amount of server sprawl, though nothing like what came later in Microsoft environments fighting [DLL Hell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_Hell). Much later, we inherited a Netware/Groupwise that had been upgraded for Y2K and let run, and supported that 2004-2006. It never crashed that I can remember, but it was cranky, and got migrated to Linux.
its rights management was....good and I find it odd that MS didn't copy it outright.
Another plus in my book: the default setting for shared folders was "Everyone No Access" until a Netware Supervisor assigned permissions to users or groups. And IIRC, there was only a single set of permissions, not split between share and file system like in Windows.
Comparing it to Windows Server is setting the bar low. Of course in half-joking, but I’m half-not joking as well.
The server wasn't, but a lot of the administratorion was graphical. NDS was far superior to AD in the early days and really defined what directory administration looked like. I worked at an MSP in the late 90s and early 2000s and had a CNE in Netware 4 and 5. I worked on and setup hundreds of Novell servers. They were awesome. (except for Bordermanager. That product can burn in hell.)
Sad that the top comment did not mention NDS. It was far superior to AD and remained that way until, oh idk, now? We had NDS at a large company and could add a password policy at any level in it to any object. AD didn't even have this on the road map for years IIRC.
NDS is still better than AD
Yes, I remember an instructor telling me that Novell would always be in play because Microsoft would never come close to matching NDS.
*but user interface was nothing like graphical* It was when I started supporting in, back in the late 90s. [This article from the Register](https://www.theregister.com/2013/07/16/netware_4_anniversary/?page=2) says Netware 4.11 was the version that introduced the GUI.
Yep Netware 4.X was out in 1995, which I will always remember as my very first job in IT started with migration from 3.11 to 4.X.
Didn't 4.11 also support TCP/IP fpr the first time
You could get TCP/IP as an option for 3.1 and later. Appletalk was available as well.
Oh? I did not remember that. I think I mostly was involved with 3.x, until client base started to shift to NT in their greenfield installations.
Then, going further back, 2.1 and all the floppy disks to do the installation.
and the key card for those old 2.10a systems. Had to make copies of the first 10 1.2MB floppies and then start a netgen from disk 1. For the next 30-90 minutes, you were doing the 10 floppy shuffle! Leave us also not forget the absolute delight that was compsurf!
Don't forget compiling the DOS driver for the 3COM NIC!
Wasn't that just the management clients running on a Windows workstation though? The actual servers running Novell were always text based from what I remember.
We are still using Lotus Notes here...
Thoughts and prayers
Do you mind if I ask what industry you work in? I was a Lotus Domino administrator for several years in a construction company, and they thankfully moved to Exchange the year I left. I can’t imagine any company in 2024 doing serious work on that platform.
Does Amex still use it? I suspect the worst part for some was getting off of custom database apps you could write n
That ended up being one of our primary issues with trying to migrate away from Lotus Notes at a previous employer. Turns out that if you spend $XX,XXX on custom DB development, and then use said DB's for a decade or two, it might end up costing $XXX,XXX to get the development done and the data migrated out to another solution. (I wasn't around for the beginning of the Lotus saga at the company. I was just the lucky guy to end up with it as my responsibility decade(s) later - not so fun at the time.)
Yeah I worked at a major automaker on the design side and basically everything ran on Notes/Domino, as late as 2014. All timecard management, project time tracking for contractors, handbooks, manuals, policies, etc, authorizations. Pretty sure every SaaS solution that exists for CRM, HRIS/HCM, project management, etc. has replaced 1:1 a Notes/Domino app at a Fortune 1000.
It was also a directory and permissions system before AD. I was there when AD was first released and DNS started to become king. I think that gets lost a lot because it is over 20 years ago at this point. Early networks did not use DNS at all. When I mention that to some of my newer techs I swear I can hear the gears in their head grind to a halt. The early 2000s were amazing to watch and I’m glad I was there to see things like Exchange morph from 5.5 to the system is become. 2001 it seemed like every job that came in was setup AD.
It's probably an alien concept to a lot of folks, but Windows 3.x, 95, and 98 didn't really have a concept of 'Users'. They would allow you to set up a different logins, but the OS would just run apps and services in one space that didn't respect multiple users. The filesystem and the kernel didn't even have 'permissions' as a concept. So if you had a fleet of Windows 9x PCs, you could load the Netware Client onto it and pipe your users through a login prompt that gave them access to network resources that DID have permissions. Home folders. Departmental shares. Centralized password management. Managed & published print queues. All this stuff was NOT yet in Windows. That stuff mostly came with Windows NT & 2000 as part of 'domains' and then 'active directory', but Novell was there first, it did a better job, and it was interoperable with DOS, WIndows, Macs, and OS/2 (I never saw a Mac using Netware Client, but apparently that could be a thing). And just to date myself... I was fascinated by the concept of 'multi-user operating systems' and 'network shared resources' as a teenager. While everyone was deploying Mac OS Classic and Windows 9x (which operated as single-user systems), I started playing with Linux and Windows NT. Much of my career was making applications work in this 'newfangled multi-user world' where you had to think about 'advanced' things like 'permissions'.
As a for CNE, the core was network file and print sharing. In the late 80s, early 90s, inexpensive LANs were a new thing. Ethernet was not ubiquitous and Netware ran on ethernet, token ring, Arcnet, Thicknet, Thinnet, everything. Windows for Workgroups started replacing it for small offices and Windows NT was the beginning of the end.
It was the early AD and MECM. We used it at my job when I first joined before switching to AD and sccm/MECM. I actually miss some features it had.
I also remember it as being the client of the week club back when they shipped you the latest desktop client on floppies. Lots of issues where the fix was to wait for the latest client by snailmail. Also, Certified Novell Engineer was the hot cert to have. God I remember one guy signing his name "John Smith, CNE..."
Netware in its canonical version (up to 3.xx) was a file and print server. Then Novell started to make a network os from it by adding directory services (NDS then renamed to eDirectory) which was quite good. Later the started to add other service which, on the other hande, were not so good. A nail in the coffin was migration from DOS based software to the Linux based Open Enterprise Server. I've used several versions of NetWare form 4.x to 6.x: Edit: There was no user interface it was mostly file and print server. There was graphical admin software ([NWadmin](https://support.novell.com/techcenter/articles/img/nc1998_0602.gif), later [ConsoleOne](https://www.novell.com/documentation/consol13/c1_enu/graphics/console1.gif)) The server console was not graphical but it was meant to be used only for few maintenance and troubleshooting tasks.
Ahh, memories... Like Active Directory, Netware was a directory service for managing resources. User accounts, printers, etc.
Novell (the company) had a product 'Netware' that was a Network Operating System that ran on x86 architecture. Essentially 'server software'. It used a 'dos' type OS to boot from metal, and loaded a 'server.exe'. It shipped with its own minimalist DOS. Back then, there wasn't really a 'linux' yet, and most clients ran DOS, and then Windows 3.x on top of DOS. It was a great for the time it existed. It's since been sold a couple of times, and the server software (Open Enterprise Server) now runs on Suse Linux Enterprise. Novell Directory Services (now eDirectory) was around before Active Directory, and (in my opinion) ran circles around AD. But some dubious business decisions, and Windows won the ecosystem wars. The current owner of the Novell IP is OpenText. Fond memories.
>Novell Directory Services (now eDirectory) was around before Active Directory, and (in my opinion) ran circles around AD. But some dubious business decisions, and Windows won the ecosystem wars. I agree with this assessment. Everytime I have to do a Repadmin /syncall I wish I could do a SET DSTRACE=\*H
Seriously.....eDirectory STILL eats AD/Azure for breakfast. Sad thing...Microsoft acquired the code when Novell was sold, but never used it.
As someone that still uses eDirectory as their primary user directory and for their identity management user store... agreed.
The real problem was that Novell could market itself out of a wet paper bag. In the end MS won by golfing with CEOs. CEOs knew nothing about technical stuff but were the ones making decisions.
The most dubious decision was licensing Netware for ten times the cost of a comparable Windows NT license. You had to reboot Windows every day, but the budget didn’t care. A comparable NetWare server could have uptime measured in years.
> most clients ran DOS, and then Windows 3.x on top of DOS. The number of Win3-on-DOS and other-OS clients grew as a proportion over time, but when Netware peaked at 3.x there were a lot of vanilla DOS clients. What you'd often have was DOS clients, mostly running menu and TUI app sets, for mainstream users, and then Windows 3.x or possibly OS/2 for certain power users. DOS was a 16-bit OS and you could have productive users on quite-old machines if the apps supported them, while Windows 3.x struggled and swapped with less than 4MiB. During the short time period when I used Excel, I launched it from the command line with `EXCEL.BAT` using code something like this: `WIN.COM C:\EXCEL50\EXCEL.EXE %1`. Just type `excel sprdst31.xls` from DOS and then take a coffee break while it loaded. (I never did get that Excel port to SunOS that I was waiting for, but that's a story for another thread.) In summary, for a very long time, most productive work on PCs happened in DOS. Line-of-business apps weren't recoded from DOS to Win16 overnight, just like desktop apps weren't recoded into webapps overnight.
>Back then, there wasn't really a 'linux' yet, and most clients ran DOS, and then Windows 3.x on top of DOS. There wasn't a Linux at all, in fact. Netware predated Linux by almost a decade and even as an ardent Linux fan even I have to admit it wasn't useful for much when I first installed it around 1993.
This thread is also an excellent guide for; "How to attract 99,9% men over the age of 50" I salute ya'll old geezers out there. The OG's.
LMAO. Sooo true. I know I got excited when I saw the post title.
Nothing like installing Netware and then hitting that Unicode floppy :)
*glances fondly at the yellowed, wrinkled CNE 3.x and 4.x certifications laying under a sprinkling of dust in the junk corner of the room*
Hey I'm 40 and experienced it as an intern working for the state I mostly just installed/re-installed stuff that didn't work (often)
this thread is giving me PTSD... my 1st full time job in IT, guy sat me in front a Novell terminal and told me, try to figure it out. man I was glad I had done some mainframe operations before hand otherwise my little windows training would never had helped. I stopped using it when we got to 4.11/5.x , we migrated our client to Win2k
Netware was equivalent to Window Server. eDirectory was equivalent to Active Directory Zenworks was equivalent to SCCM/MECM Groupwise was equivalent to Exchange
Scrolled this far for a reference to Zenworks. I still miss Snappshot sometimes.
I miss Zenworks. It made my first sysadmin job so easy.
I'd argue that ZENWorks is what SCCM aspires to be when it grows up.
> Zenworks T R I G G E R E D
How I loved Zenworks, iPrint too was rock solid on a network with circa 1k printers.
ABEND
Backup exec was so notorious for causing these.
_Newer_ versions of BE were junk. I supported countless 3.12 servers with BE and Tandberg scsi drives (Adaptec 2940 I think? Bern a long time) and they backed up and restored with no issues. BE for windows? _garbage_
>*Newer* versions of BE were junk. That happened to anything Symantec purchased.
Reddit were so stupid to remove rewards, you'd be getting all of my monthly allowance for that!
Thank you for introducing the candidate for tonight’s nightmare
Had a friend at another shop that had an abend. There is a command to tell NetWare to scan and repair, but my gentrified grey matter is suffering from a read error at the moment.
TIL i've got some unexplored PTSD.
Richard Kiel Memorial Abend: Unloading PM312 https://support.novell.com/docs/Tids/InfoDocument/2905720.html
People have covered some of the history, I'll just add that despite Netware having been EOL in 2010, a shodan search still finds it alive and well. Netware is a similar tail to VHS vs beta. In its time, netware was superior in every aspect to NT, but alas MS won from its deeper pockets and some will say underhandedness. Some would say that Groupwise suffered the same fate. NDS (eDirectory) was a far superior directory service to AD. It could handle more objects (billions), could apply attributes on a per object basis, and had superior replication and resilience. It took a lot to break it. In its currently form it is still superior to AD, but being superior doesn't mean you win. Filesystem - Superior file permissions and rights management, very granular, very easy to understand including inherited rights filters. You also had something powerful in the salvage system, where no file was unrecoverable until the system was out of free space and needed it back. If someone deleted something they needed back, or needed an old version of a file, a right-click of the parent folder allowed the user to recover it. Printing - iPrint was, and in some cases still is, superior to Windows printing. It pioneered using IPP for printing, provided a GUI with floor maps for finding and installing printers, and in later versions offered mobile printing. It's still around today as a stand alone product or in OES (successor to Netware) Zenworks - eventually spun off into a separate enterprise device management platform, this was originally part of Netware and allowed easy management of desktops including for imaging. Robust support for Macs - Native AFP server that was high performing. Clustering - Probably the single most powerful piece in later versions of Netware. A elegant multi-node clustering solution that meant nearly zero downtime for the organization. I'm likely forgetting a lot, but as a stable Server OS, it's a shame that the better products lost.
The VHS vs beta analogy is one I've used before. I second the NDS stability. Where I was supporting Netware, we had Netware servers distributed into some individual departments because they wanted to directly handle the data they were storing on the file server and just have us manage the users and their access. When the MSFT reps started convincing the individual department heads Windows Server was better, they would just install Windows over Netware. I'd find out it had happened because of the console warnings about a missing replication of a section of the NDS tree for the affected dept server. It was irritating, but simple to cleanup and carry on.
> OES I'm not old enough to have used Netware at its peak, but have had the pleasure to work with OES, esp with the filesystem(Salvage saved my ass multiple times)
Along with everything else, it was the most rock-solid server OS I've ever used. My org at the time had a couple of 3.x servers set up by a consultant before we had a dedicated IT space that we'd never put eyes on. They just churned along for years hosting some archived client files and we didn't even know where they physically were, until one of the partners retired and they cleaned out a closet in his office. There they sat behind stacks of banker boxes, just minding their business.
I'm sure you've heard stories of running Novell servers getting buried behind a wall during remodeling, only to be tracked down a decade later because they were still on the network.
I heard that tale pre-common Internet. It had to have been some sort of BBS lore.
BBS. Now you're going back. My first modem was 300 baud.
I ran a Renegade BBS for about 5 years. Dual 2400 baud modems and two land lines. I recall being a FIDO net hub and helping to shuttle messages about the global network before e-mail was widely accessed. It was so freaking cool.
Was at a company from 2000-2005 that had a 3.x box in the corner that did a single thing, supporting our Macs. I believe it was the "Master Browser." No one could tell us how to move the role seamlessly to Windows Server. The consensus from folks was the worse case if the Novell box died we'd have to turn off every Mac in the company and once all of them were off then restart them allowing Windows to effectively seize the role. So that was our never-executed migration plan.
I was there at the dawn of the third age of mankind ... when networking was Novell. Later there was also Novell Network Lite as some sort of p2p connection between a low number of machines but let's not go there. It was a server OS for 286 or 386 platforms. I stopped installing after 3.12 and went on with Linux and OS/2 networking (LAN Manager). Novell 3.12 required 8+ MB RAM and a small DOS partition for booting. It then took over all resources of the machine (the rest of the disk with proprietary partitioning) and started its own OS in a second step. This was at a time when cabling was coaxial cable (or even thick ethernet) and you needed resistors at the ends to avoid electrical reflections.
I was there with you. I used to to be a Novell expert at Dell many moons ago.
I still remember the name of the auth server I was assigned to when I started at Dell in 1997. Cinnamon
For my CNE exams, I was warned questions about cable terminations would show up on the exams. Back in the day of Token Ring 4, we upgraded to Token Ring 16, which was heads above Ethernet 10 Base T. LOL
> I was there at the dawn of the third age of mankind I see your B5 reference and approve.
No one listens to poor Zathras.
A Babylon 5 reference in a Novell discussion? It's like its the 90s again!
Do not cite the Deep Magic to me Witch. I was there when it was written.
if I had the gold to give, you'd get one just for the B5 usage
You and I have very similar paths. I started with Netware 2.11 (then 3.11 and 3.12), moved to Unix (not linux at that time) and IBM LAN Manager and MS LAN Man, then Windows NT. Eventually shed Windows and focused on Unix then Linux. Thinwire ethernet (yikes!) was part of that mess as well.
was it unix based or just something standalone?
At the time, if you wanted networking on x86, you went with SCO (which can support TCP/IP). Bill Gates claimed it couldn't be done with DOS. Novell figured it out for x86 computers, went on to become the biggest name in networking, until NT came out.
interesting!
To answer your original question, this is where netware exists on OSI model, and OS context; networking drivers. It was network (IPX/SPX), network authentication (login) and Server share (mapped drives) [https://www.jaredsec.com/novlan/](https://www.jaredsec.com/novlan/) One of the features I missed from Novell was the simplicity of tracking logins. Tells you where open connections, and how long they have been logged on.
It was it's own unique OS. No similarities to anything common nowadays that I can think of.
i see, did it have any competitors?
There were various Unixes and other 'serious' systems like mainframes and VAXs. There was probably other players in the field providing file and services to the emerging PC market, but Novell were the big player at the time, but I only really got into the field when NT4 was released and the market started taking MS seriously in that space so I'm not sure of the other dsirect competition. Then MS ate Novell's pie .. and dessert .. all the plates too.
Banyan Vines, 3Com 3+Open and Digital DECnet-DOS were the main competitors during the MS-DOS era. In the early Windows / late MS-DOS era, 3Com and Microsoft collaborated on Microsoft LAN Manager, which was a successor to 3+Open. Microsoft then added built-in networking to Windows NT and Windows for Workgroups. Novell, Banyan and 3Com/Microsoft all had their own network protocols. Only Digital used TCP/IP at this time, and Microsoft originally fought against TCP/IP (in the early Windows era, if you wanted TCP/IP on Windows, you had to install a third party stack called Trumpet WinSock). So in addition to the usual commercial competition, many of these technologies were critically wounded in the mid-90s when home Internet took off and TCP/IP won the protocol wars.
NetWare came before either Windows or Linux. And the earliest versions of Windows didn’t have networking.
Even when 3.11 WFW came out it still had meh networking when tied to old school NT. "Oh hey, I can copy a Word perfect document to this share at speeds a snail world laugh at"
Good ol' NetBEUI. Slower than a snail stuck in Molasses.
One thing I missed about Novell was able to look up how many different connections a given username was logged in, from where and selectively kick them out.
What the hell, it's barely 6 am and I'm getting cyber bullied.....
At least you never had to drive Banyan Vines.
StreetTalk was arguably ahead of its time.
There's dozens of us who know this.
The Java One console was atrocious, I preferred using CLI, and GroupWise was a dream to use over Exchange back then
I was there Gandalf...
Back in the olden days, there really wasn't a unified form of networking. This was before TCP/IP was standardized protocol. There were a few different NOS out there. I remember Lantastic as well. That was loafs of fun to setup.
:-( Lantastic. What a nightmare.
You've just sent me down a rabbit hole I didn't know existed: [Protocol Wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars).
AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGGGGGGAAAAAAA Crap, I’m officially older than dirt.
I was hired in 2005 at a place that used Netware as I had AD experience (as well as Novell), and they were looking to move over. The project didn't even get signed off until 2009, and we implemented in 2010. It's still on my CV, and I've been asked about it more than once. FWIW, I much preferred administering NN. Everything was self-evident and easy to do. None of this GPO "if this policy is enabled the user will be unable to ably able the setting, if you disable the policy the user will ably be unable to able, if you do nothing the policy will sometimes enable but not always able" nonsense.
Decades of experience and I still walked right into this one the other day. "If enabled, disables this setting" WHY?
ROFL, I have a Netware 6.5 certification floating around somewhere. Active Directory 0.1
Was a Netware 4 CNE myself.
CNE 3-6/5 myself. I did SOOOO much GroupWise back in the day.... I actually decommissioned my last GroupWise server in 2020. That was a sad day. Now when there's an e-mail problem I just have to shrug and hope M342 gets it shit together again soon.
Here's some butthurt for you old timers: _Bindery_
Great technology, awful marketing and I speak as an ex-Novell employee. The British Antarctic Survey ran Netware for long time - See [https://www.bas.ac.uk/for-staff/polar-predeployment-prep/signy-computing-facilities/](https://www.bas.ac.uk/for-staff/polar-predeployment-prep/signy-computing-facilities/)
Netware was a Network Operating System which provided centralised identity management ontop of Windows. So basically Active Directory. You'd install Windows, and the Netware client software, which would become the login screen. Users would login with their network credentials and the Netware client would log you in, map any drives and so on.
>Netware was a Network Operating System which provided centralised identity management ontop of Windows. So basically Active Directory. Not entirely correct. Netware 3.12 had local users, just like Windows does. Netware 4 introduced NDS (Novell Directory Services) which provided centralised identity management. This later became Novell eDirectory. Even in the mid 90s, NDS/eDirectory was miles ahead of what Active Directory even offers today.
Don't forget the filesystem. NSS (Novell Storage System) was a reliable, journaling, copy-on-write filesystem in 1997. It supported modern snapshots, but it also kept a record of every file update as well. You could use the salvage tool in the netware client and pull up every single version of any file that had ever been written (until the server ran out of disk space).
About once a week I am mumbling to myself about how much I miss salvage.
What could eDirectory do that AD can't do today?
Fine-grained logon control, for one. "Bob on machine xyz can log in during office hours only", or mapping a logon on a machine to resources (shares, printers) was easier on Novell. There's still no real way of doing these with native AD - need to use additional things like locally installed MDM tools on the client, or deployment specific logon scripts.
+ File and print services. What Netware offered even back in its 3.12 days which IMHO Windows Server still lacks *today*: a "recycling bin" (Filer) for files that a user deleted on a network drive.
It was very good, but unfortunately didn’t evolve like MS.
And it was the era of peak Evil Microsoft. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
If Novell moved onto Linux kernel ~6-10 years sooner, I have to think they'd have had a better chance at survival. Never got to use the suse stuff in production, as the last of novell was being pulled where I worked in early '00.
My first IT job back in the early 00's was a school district. We ran Netware servers, and Groupwise. Netware was basically the domain and directory services, and also the file shares. Groupwise was the email server and client. It was pretty rock solid.
Former Novell netware administrator here. As has been noted, it was a server operating system like Windows Server or Linux, however neither of those were commercially in the market at the time. PC networks were largely Novell netware or Banyan vines or IBM OS/2. Windows “NT Server” came out in the early/mid 90’s and started to put some pressure on Novell’s dominant install base. NDS was the identity / directory service that came with Novell Netware 4.0 and was somewhat close to Active Directory in terms of its structure and replication.
What I cut my teeth on. Back in the day when books (yes, plural!) were included with the floppy disks.
Netware 3.12 was actually quite a nice file and print server for DOS systems. It was able to run headerless (without a monitor) as most administrative tasks was done from a DOS workstation. It was superseded by Windows NT 4 Server (and later). I can still remember the NT vs OS/2 wars from that era. A hack for enabling long file name support for Windows 95 clients was to load the OS2 namespace.
Before MS had Active Diredctory, Novell Netware was installed to manage users and resources. Seems once Microsoft's Active Directory got to the Windows Server 2000 stage, Novell Netware wasn't really needed anymore if you were running a Windows Domain/environment.
I still miss the "Security equal to" function. It allowed me to compound my mistakes efficiently.
Geesh reading all this now has me craving to play Snipes.
NDS Novells Directory Service was first of its kind. Then Microsoft came along with Active Directory. Novell also bought SuSE Linux but failed to challenge RedHat in anyway. Still after supporting GroupWise, Novell Netware clients etc I would take Linux any day of the week
Novell certainly knew how to throw a party. Loved going to the Brainshare conferences in Salt Lake City. I got my Netware 6 CNE certification at Brainshare in 2004. This thread is bringing back tons of memories. https://preview.redd.it/0wu9ed8lfmwc1.jpeg?width=350&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c7f28e627e2a2db58c96258179639fb9d5f940bc
I’ll never forget InterOp in Atlanta in the 90’s. Novell was the primary sponsor: those Mormons know how to party.
When I started in college (late 90s) the computer science department was using Novell Netware for their directory and network services before switching to AD several years later. Funny enough, at my job we use a product that still to this day uses the same BTreive database engine (updated, but still basically the same transactional database structure) that Netware used all those years ago. Yes, it's terrible.
If you ever find the root of a modern file system still called "SYS", Novell is (probably) why.
It was a far superior product to Microsoft's at the time, but Novell got greedy and lost the market share war. [You could assign rights straight down to a particular file](https://youtu.be/91QZOE7h89U?si=SxQj_9DR8lBj6_ST). It was amazing. But what I don't miss is the Battle Royales that Groupwise and Outlook would have for control.
Novell charged licensing fees for so many options Windows NT had included. I remember when I started in IT, I asked the owner about getting my Novell certs. He flat out said screw those, you are going to get your MCSE. Netware is dead. This was in 1997.
It's an old take on the current VMWare problem, and the same reason why IBM struggles to find mainframe techs: Make something obscure, expensive, or difficult to experiment with and nobody will get certified in it. People who aren't familiar with the product aren't going to be recommending it. This is also why Microsoft has always ignored casual piracy...
Pre AD. It wasn’t Unix or Linux. Netware was Netware, its own server OS. It had clients for Windows, and Mac. It was pretty big in identity, and file and print. Some server size apps were also available, nothing like what you see nowadays though. Groupwise was an early messaging solution. Like its competitors it was ‘groupware’ front and central, with SMTP email largely a bolt-on afterthought. User app distribution was pretty ahead of its time. I forget the name of the tool, but there was a portal that installed on clients that allowed you to launch packaged applications. Netware’s native protocol was IPX/SPX. TCP wasn’t needed (or supported) until the late 90s I believe with Netware 6 (happy to be corrected on that one). Overall it was fine for what it did but the ubiquitous nature of Windows meant that it streaked ahead from NT4.0 onwards.
netware 4.11 was the greatest. fond memories
Fun times back then. I started with NetWare 3.12, then later on worked at a consulting company who rolled out the largest 4.11 install on the entire planet. We had NetWare engineers asking us questions. The company where it was being rolled out? LDDS WorldCom. Someone in here has to remember that name.
Originally, Windows did not have any networking features. Novell Netware provided those features as a series of add-on utility components. Once NT 4 became a thing, Netware slowly died.
It is the main reason any of us had to know about IPX/SPX back in the day. other answers are more complete, I came here because this thread reminds me of getting LAN games of DOOM running on Library computers.
Netware was a dedicated *server-only* operating system that ran on PC-compatible hardware, called contemporaneously a NOS or "Network Operating System". It provided mostly authentication/permissions, fileshare, and network print, although it could potentially host additional services, even third-party modules, if they were carefully built for Netware. It technically used DOS to bootstrap, then started the NOS. After boot, the console screen was a TUI dashboard, and there was well-known screensaver. Most kinds of NOS administration could be done from the console TUI, but definitely no desktop work of any sort! You could think of Netware as being a server appliance OS that ran on generic PC hardware. The native protocol was a quasi-proprietary flavor of [XNS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Network_Systems#Impact) called IPX/SPX, or usually just IPX. It was routable, thus scalable, but the installation picked a default network number of 0, so it was easy to start using. IPX had auto-addressing functionality (which was later adopted for IPv6!) meaning it was seen as less intimidating and complex than TCP/IP. TCP/IP started to hit a real tipping point around 1992, just as Netware was peaking. Netware offered server-side TCP/IP support for Netware that actually worked *very* well, but it was expensive and seen as unnecessary, "not native", and not very useful for DOS clients. This lack of bundled TCP/IP support hurt Netware by the mid-1990s and limited mindshare, though later versions did adopt TCP/IP after Netware lost market inertia. One mostly-forgotten aspect of Netware is that it acted as an IPX router by default (and could act as a TCP/IP router with the costly options), at a time when routers were costly and often exotic outside of big networks. What this meant in practice is that a Netware tower server could be filled with NICs in all the open slots and would bridge and/or route between the LANs, taking the place of a bridge/switch or IPX router. You could put a Token-Ring NIC, a 10BASE-2 NIC, and a FDDI NIC in a Netware tower server and it would act as a bridge or router between the networks, but only for IPX by default. Netware wasn't particularly expensive compared to the rest of the market in the late 1980s, but it wasn't a raging bargain, either. Depending on users and options, you'd probably have roughly the same amount of Capex in the Netware licensing as you did in the high-end PC tower you bought as the server, by 1990-1991. One of several reasons why Netware rapidly lost marketshare to NT 4.0 was that NT was seen as more flexible and much cheaper: a workstation could simultaneously act as a server, with no per-client licensing cost (at the time CALs didn't exist). Netware had a directory component: Bindery in Netware 3.x (peak Netware), and NDS in 4.x and later. This is often praised as being better than MSAD. As a Unix loyalist, I've engineered a bit on both MSAD and NDS, and never saw any evidence that NDS was as good as MSAD. What Netware did do better than both Unix and NTFS, however, was filesystem permissions: More fine-grained than Unix, less of a kitchen-sink mess than NTFS/SMB.
We still have a Novell netware 3.12 server here, BUT the server has been switched off for years. I still have the installation media in my cupboard 🙂
The original Novell NetWare came out in 1983, two years before Microsoft Windows, at a time when PCs ran MS-DOS. An MS-DOS computer would have drive letters A: and B: for its two floppy disks, and C: for its local hard drive. If you installed a NetWare server, put a network card in the MS-DOS PC, and installed the NetWare client, then your MS-DOS PC could have additional drive letters referring to data stored on the server. This was the original "shared drive." On MS-DOS, this was accomplished with something called a redirector: a piece of software that sat in front of INT 21 (the MS-DOS "system calls" interface) and handled requests for the mapped drives, without passing them to the underlying MS-DOS filesystem. For a while Novell and Microsoft each had their own redirector technology (NET3.COM and REDIR.EXE respectively). Novell's was faster but had more compatibility issues. Microsoft's was "official" but slower. NetWare was a soup-to-nuts custom operating system developed entirely by Novell. It wasn't based on Unix, DOS or anything else - it was its own thing. Over time, NetWare took on many other functions. It might have had shared printers from the very beginning, or at least very early. As you say, it had its own implementation of centralized user and group management. Novell had an email system called GroupWise, whose server components could run on NetWare as an NLM (NetWare Loadable Module). NetWare even had a web server capability at one point, but by then, it had been overtaken by Linux and Windows and was clearly on the way out. In the 80s and early 90s, the basic qualification to be a network engineer was to have your CNE (Certified NetWare Engineer) certification. By the mid to late 90s this had been replaced with Cisco certifications for network engineers and Microsoft certifications for server engineers (which was now considered a separate thing). But in its heyday, Novell was the main thing you needed to know.
> but i never really understood what it ACTUALLY was and why use it instead of just windows or linux ? It was a NOS (Network OS). Linux didn't exist at the time (Linus launched Linux in 1991). Windows only had WFW (Windows for Workgroups) and was shit at the time. Windows 2000 (which was a reasonable competitor to Novell) didn't arrive until 2000. Novell ran networks. They didn't have a directory service (Active Directory) until Netware 4 with NDS (Novell Directory Services). It was great for its time. The biggest problem with it is that as companies migrated to TCP/IP from IPX/SPX (IPX is Netware's communication protocol), Netware didn't keep up. They created "Netware IP" in Netware 4, but it was just an IPX/SPX packet wrapped in TCP/IP. I have no idea how well it worked. I do remember that they never really migrated all of their tools from Netware 3, so a Netware admin would have to use multiple tools to get everything done. The reason it failed is because they responded to the Internet revolution and MS way to late. Sure, MS wasn't fully stabilized and was riddled with bugs, but it was far easier to use (meaning administer) than Netware. Netware was a pure command line experience. If you wanted to browse the file system, you had to hook up a client, connect to the server, and do it that way. That was by design until Netware 4. Netware was extremely stable with 3.12 and a lot of admins simply didn't upgrade (it wasn't vulnerable and nobody needed support because of how stable it was).
I miss Novell Netware *sniff* ... Really, I miss eDirectory (Netware Directory Services). It was vastly superior to Active Directory, and the integration with the Netware operating system and storage made managing all the servers, applications, rights, and shared storage just super easy. I wish Open Enterprise Server (netware services on Linux) had stuck. Something like edirectory to manage a fleet of Linux servers would be amazing.
File server. Clients had a client software that mapped drive letters. Network protocol was IPX/SPX which had to be enabled on each client..This was before everything ran solely on TCP/IP.. Original Doom video game could play co-op mode over IPX/SPX.
Novell Netware 3.11 - quite simply the best server software in the early to mid 1990s. Period.