Message-ID: <013601c0441b$931f9460$11fea8c0@dell>
From: "Ben A L Jemmett" <ben DOT jemmett AT ukonline DOT co DOT uk>
To: "Delorie List" <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
References: <67BAFB085CD7D21190B80090273F74A45B7D17 AT emwatent02 DOT meters DOT com DOT au>
Subject: Re: A little history
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2000 15:49:56 -0000
Organization: Jemmett Glover Software Development
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Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com

> Actually, I found NetWare 3 to be crap (especially printing bugs).
> Maybe lacked some patches ... ?
Vanilla 3.12 can be as stable as rock - ran my last server (1200 users, 120
workstations in use usually, and about 12 printers scattered around) for 6
years without patching it.  3.12 does have some Y2K problems (just cosmetic
as I recall), and so should be patched up-to-date - but since the NetWare
3.x series is now discontinued (last week, I think), it shouldn't affect any
new users.

> OTOH, NetWare 4 was a thing of beauty and joy, rock solid and
> no printing bugs!
Never used it, but there's a reason NetWare is/was the most popular PC NOS -
that's probably it :)

> Also, Novell's 32 bit DOS drivers were a thing of beauty and joy,
> living in extended memory and using no conventional memory
> (not even UMB space :-).
Yes, the Client32 is a very nice piece of engineering.  Unfortunately they
haven't officially updated it to do Pure IP in a NetWare 5 environment, but
it will do it if you fiddle a bit.  It basically worked by extending DOS
with support for the Novell NLM format - it's a DLL loader for DOS, and then
the client lives in this sort of minature NetWare environment.  The NLMs are
even supposed to be aware of the possibility of multi-threading and
multitasking capabilities within the client (I think they need to call the
NiosThreadSwitch every so often if they're doing a loop of non-blocking
calls, just as NetWare NLMs should) - I'll have to investigate my old source
archives to see if I ever managed to recompile a simple server NLM as a
background task.

Regards,
Ben A L Jemmett.
(http://web.ukonline.co.uk/ben.jemmett/, http://www.deltasoft.com/)