From: "Tim Bird" <tbird AT caldera DOT com>
Message-Id: <9705081727.ZM7816@caldera.com>
Date: Thu, 8 May 1997 17:26:59 -0600
In-Reply-To: physmsa@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz (Mr M S Aitchison)
        "Personal Netware status (was Re: OS/2 & PNW)" (May  9, 10:33am)
References: <199705082233 DOT KAA16025 AT cantua DOT canterbury DOT ac DOT nz>
To: caldera-opendos AT caldera DOT com, opendos-developer AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Personal Netware status (was Re: OS/2 & PNW)
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Mr M S Aitchison wrote:
>
> Is the status of Personal Netware:
>
>  Not open, but distributable in binary form (with some restrictions)
>  with OpenDOS only when sold by Caldera?

Yes.

>
> Personal Netware is very good, but I get the impression that Personal
> Netware isn't being developed by Novell yet is stopeed by them from
> being developed further by others.

Unfortunately, yes.  I don't know if Novell would admit that they aren't
working on it, but this is indeed the case  (even though the original
team was quite small, and the revenue from it continues - Novell doesn't
know what to do with something that only makes 10 million a year)

>
> Although there seem to be some minor problems (mainly in printing to
> serial printers) the only thing I'd like to see work put into at the
> moment is making it inter-operate with other systems (e.g. adapt the
> Linux netware server to handle PNW as well; allow Netware servers to
> re-export local printers from PC's running SERVER; work with OS/2 and
> Macs; make SERVER work while other software is running - such as TCPIP
> stacks or W95).

I'd like to see the Linux Netware server handle PNW also.  Most of the
NCPs (the packet requests used to provide file and print service) are
identical.  Personal NetWare adds about 30 NCPs for its own purposes
(like resource administration), but even this number overstates the
amount of work which would be involved, since most of these are
variants of a single set of resource management verbs.

I think an NLM could be written to allow NetWare servers to re-export local
printers now.  Personal NetWare supports a (fairly complete) subset of
NetWare's QMS (Queue Management System), which means jobs can be extracted
from PNW print queues and put into NetWare print queues, using existing
server binaries.

I don't know about OS/2 and Macs.

The SERVER should run OK with other software running.  The server wouldn't
run natively under Win95, but I always wanted to try running it in a WIN95
dosbox.  I suspect, if it doesn't run, then it's because of a very small
set of critical section issues in the server (or blatant dumbness in
the win95 virtualization of IPX asynchronous events)  I don't have
Windows95 (I'm waiting for a desparately needed application to pull
me over - until then I'll collect interest on my money instead of Bill.)

>
> Hopefully somebody will say some of these are possible at the moment,
> but they aren't generally perceived to be.

I could give you a list a mile long of "interesting" stuff to do if the
source were available.  It is quite frustrating to see a company not
develop something, but also not make it available for others to develop.

I actually started working on adding some PNW support to the Linux
NetWare server once, but I couldn't get the blasted thing working
on a 1.x series kernel.  I'm in the process of upgrading my home machine
to Linux 2.x, but I don't know if I'll have much time to look at it.

Tim Bird