I used to work at Novell back in mid 90s. I transitioned from QA to dev in the security department under Roger Schell, who brought me in.
I learned most everything I know about security protocols from that group.
But my favorite memories there were the interviews I was asked to do.
See, I’m not LDS and not from Utah. And I was chef in a previous life. And so they would ask me to take out the “California” candidates up to Oak Room at Sundance, and wine and dine them. It was a rough job for a 25 year old. We knew Eric’s days were limited (especially when he forced that Java crap at us ;-).
I never understood the location in Provo. The campus was across the street from a sewage plant treatment plant! But wait, it gets better, the animal rendering plant was 1/4 mile down the road. The worst, however, was smell of the iron factory (smelter?) or something about a mile away. Ugh. I still think of that when I play Factorio! ;-)
However, the best Indian food I have ever had is from Daniel at the Bombay House. Wow, his food has changed my life. Such love put into it. Who would have thought this possible in Provo? And I worked in Redmond for years too! I think I knew good Indian food (for a white guy from CT), having lived with six Indian guys my last year of undergrad, we would hangout all night, eating, making curry, and talking all night long.
Thanks for the post and good memories!
I ran Netware 3.x and 4.x in the late 90s & early 00s. It was a big professional office, and nothing was public-facing (all we had was an ISDN line anyway).
It was great, honestly. It took me years with Linux to become as comfortable as I was with Netware. The stability of those machines, in fact, allowed me free time to learn Linux in the first place.
this man speaks the truth. IPX/SPX was king back then. Frankly, SPX is recognized today as better 'tcp'/'packet' performance than ipv4.
If it ever comes back it needs to stick to its roots. LAN performance was stellar, and still is. I think a certain high level bank still runs it, cause no hackers understand the lan protocol.
> Enterprise management is impossible with Microsoft's domain based Windows NT networking. Microsoft Active Directory, part of the ever later Windows 2000, was supposed to fix this, but it now appears MAD may be a failure (Microsoft is already trying to sell its shortcomings as "features" and it isn't even out yet).
Oh, poor Novell. This is all before my time, but to me Novell's legacy is just "that company in the SCO vs. Novell lawsuit" and occasionally seeing IPX traffic from e.g. printers in Wireshark. It's odd to look at what could have been, from a once dominant player that's disappeared into "tech myth" now.
This really does seem to be an attempt at smiling in the face of death though -- I've never played with NetWare but it's not hard to see how Win2k would capture the market; setting up an AD domain is a click-through process on a familiar OS/GUI, why bother licensing and learning something like NetWare if Windows is good enough...
I remember Novells NDS (directory service) to be miles head of Microsoft AD back in Windows 2000, and even many years after. But AD was included "for free" in Windows, and the rest is history...
> But AD was included "for free" in Windows, and the rest is history...
I don't think that's a valid point.
NDS was included for free in all versions of Netware from 4.0 onwards. The Windows client for Netware was free, and Netware came with the Windows management tools and so on.
I upgraded one company's network with a fleet of new workstations in about 1999. A few previous consultants told them it was impossible because they'd lost the installation media for the network client. Back then, it was new, but they didn't know you could just... download the client from Novell's website.
So I did, and switched out a fleet of 16-bit Windows boxes for NT 4 clients and the official Novell client. No CD drives: just bootstrap NT install with a DOS floppy, fetch the installation files from the server. Saved enough cost to pay for a few extra workstations.
It wasn't about price. The 2 killer factors of NT 4 Server displacing Netware 4 were:
* Ease of use: you didn't need to know what you were doing with NT. It's Windows. Click around, click "Next" and "OK" enough, you can get it going.
* Netware servers were effectively dedicated to file and print. There were a few server apps but many of them destroyed Netware's famed stability. NT 4 Server is just Windows and you can run anything you like on the server, while it's still being a server.
NetWare was reliable as long as you used high quality hardware and didn't run any third-party applications on the server. It didn't support real memory protection or preemptive multitasking so if you tried to run a database or email application on the NetWare server itself then it got shaky. But the core file and printer sharing features were fast and rock solid.
Awful, yes, unreliable no. What was unreliable was the network infrastructure - coax ethernet, or even worse frozen hosepipe and/or token ring. It was a happy day when twisted-pair, star topology ethernet was introduced.
We had a Netware 3 server back in the early 90s that at one point had about 18 months of uptime between reboots. I probably still have a picture of the server screen after it passed the 1 year mark. I haven’t had anything since that could go so long between bounces. It only ran file and print services on 10-base-2 co-ax tho.
> I haven’t had anything since that could go so long between bounces.
.... Really? Ignoring the "nothing should have that uptime due to security patches" best practice, almost everything should be able to do that barring power or hardware failure.
My OpenIndiana NAS has done >1 year uptime two or three times now.
My OpnSense firewall did once (too much road warrioring for a period) but could do it easily again.
Linux VMs have done that many times for me when I've been lazy on patching or too busy
My ESXi hosts do that too.
Thats just my basement homelab, nothing special.
I installed a cluster of Windows 2003 servers in a customer site a looong time ago that did over 1000 days uptime (no internet access/customer didn't patch/etc).
I even had a Windows XP laptop in my garage 10+ years ago that did nothing but Chrome and RDP client go over 400 days before I tripped on the power cord.
Yes, systems should be patched and all that. But really, anything not forcing updates should be able to do a year.
I agree that current systems should have no problem running for years between reboots, but which for verious reasons would not be a good idea now.
(conversely my current desktop boots so fast that I now shut it down every day. Saves a bit of power, and a clean start to each day feels good.)
But it's important to understand that back in the 90s running a machine for long periods was unusual. 18 months is certainly notable. Of course there were no security patches back then (and largely no need for them because the always-on Internet wouldn't happen for another few years.)
It's hard to understate just how unreliable tech was in the 20th century. Cars broke down a lot. Computers needed rebooting all the time. The risks taken during Mercury, Gemini and Apollo would be considered completely reckless now.
It has ever been thus. In the first world war more pilots died from mechanical failure than from enemy fire.
First we make it. Then we make it fast. Then we make it reliable.
> Yes, systems should be patched and all that. But really, anything not forcing updates should be able to do a year.
You should try Windows. After some days it becomes confused, some things (especially USB stuff) will not be recognized, programs will not load correctly etc. It is an old bug ( i've seen it also in Win 7) and nobody at Microsoft seems to care about it. Of course, a reboot fixes everything.
At work, I only rebooted my laptop for updates, otherwise I just let it sleep.
On the server, especially when running in a VM, Windows can achieve impressive uptime, I've seen one NT 4.0 server with over 5 years without a reboot.
These days, the question is if you want to keep a server up for that long just because you can. When I worked as a Windows admin, I usually rebooted the servers after installing updates.
I reboot my Win10 machine when there's a power outage long enough to run the UPS down. So probably about once a year.
I haven't had the experience you're describing since everything moved over to NT. I.e., Win95/98 did that for me, NT4, Win2000, XP, etc have never exhibited that behaviour for me.
I think this take, as a generalization, is a couple decades out of date.
To be fair, I've seen both a Windows NT 4.0 server, and a Debian server (not sure about the exact version) with several years of uptime. But these days, with everything connected to the Internet, one usually wants to install updates regularly, which often requires a reboot. Also, once the OS goes out of support, it's prudent to upgrade or get a new server altogether.
I was a CNE in the ‘90s and remember fellow CNEs with their uptime screen pictures at the conferences. I was an outlier and usually would do a weekly bounce on my servers. I didn’t necessarily have a good reason to do the bounces, but did not tend to have some of the occasional stray issues others would report. Probably was more superstition than anything.
I wonder if this ever was a security breach? Not saying it wasn't. just wondering if anyone has a real world example of such.
My problem with thick ethernet was that unless you got the angle of the cable exactly right, the cable's inflexibility would lift the workstation you were connecting off the desk. at least thin didn't (mostly) have this problem.
It was amazing just how many attempts Microsoft (and partners) had to make to topple Netware.
MS-NET was doa[0]
The eventual 3 way partnership between 3Com, IBM and MS limped along as LAN Manager, but the real turning point that I remember was the growing requirement for TCP/IP on the desktop and directory services that worked.
Novell had awesome directory services but MS were faster to rehost their file sharing on TCP, largely due to the work done to run lan manager on Unix machines. It wasn't that TCP was faster, but it had a much better inter networking story. As networks got bigger, IPX ran out of puff. Microsoft giving the product away with Windows NT was the cherry on top.
I worked at a company in the late 90’s that transitioned from Netware ( Novell ) to Microsoft. The company was growing like crazy and always renovating.
At one point, all the NetWare servers had been retired but one. They could not find it. Eventually it stopped being used but it was still on the network for a couple of years. One day, they tore down a wall to make an open area and there it was! It had been locked into an inaccessible empty space between walls but just kept running.
I never knew Novell myself ( other than the bulky adapters my laptop needed to get on the network ) but that server made a big impression on me. Legendary.
We had one of those at the old AMD campus in Austin!
I was one of the lackeys that had to go out and put hands on a list of machines we couldn't physically locate (engineers had moved them around the office for various reasons and we'd lost track of their current home). After several days, the list of ~100 machines was whittled down to just one. We knew which network port it was on but couldn't physically locate it. We had the speaker playing row row row your boat and walked around listening closely for it (even after hours) but never found it. We knew it was __ft down the network cable, but that was it - no idea where that cable actually went.
Finally we lifted ceiling tiles and traced that little cable to the top of a partition/wall... the cable dropped down into the wall with an extension cord. In the darkness we heard it dutifully still playing row row row your boat. We peeked over the wall with a flashlight and there it sat.
shutdown was issued, the extension cable was pulled but it pulled free and the poor, retired, powered down workstation clunked into the bottom of its void. We noted its odd location in the wiki and called the whole project complete.
It may well still be there even though AMD has moved away across town.
The old server-that-got-drywalled-in meme was something we as grad students in the late '90s talked about doing intentionally, to keep Internet-accessible research prototypes running after graduating.
That service or even tech report archive coming from a .edu research group wasn't in a machine room -- it was under someone's desk, or out in the lab area of old junk computers used by undergrad assistants.
We had the support of a PI. But some schools select for people who are focused on their own success. So, if unplugging an unknown machine removed a barrier to someone's immediate goal, when we were no longer there to guard it, we couldn't assume they'd pause and think, "Maybe I should contact this email/phone on the big laminated sign on this machine, before getting it out of my way."
I recall that discussion ending with the idea of the drop ceiling being the most likely place to keep it undisturbed. The exposed cable run trays for fiber and such were already right up by there. But I don't think any students from our group ever did that.
Later, the tragedy around Aaron Swartz included him stashing a machine much like that.
It's hard to explain to outsiders how MIT culture (including down from the top) celebrated having few rules, taking the initiative, and being open to a community of loosely/flexibly-affiliated people. The official MIT Museum even celebrated mischief that was possibly illegal.
I don't know whether the outside authorities understood that Swartz's activity was closer to normal/approved than it would seem to an outsider. Some activity had to stop, but I think the culture would've been to nudge the curious and energetic young person onto a better path.
There was a point in time when Novell Netware was the dominant corporate server.
It had a chance to be huge, but Novell blew it because they steadfastly refused to implement memory protection and task preemption. The small number of third party application servers built for Netware dropped off and went to Windows.
If Novell had made Netware into a robust platform it might have had a real chance.
Netware was huge, for its day. It beat back Microsoft more successfully than anyone else managed in the 80s and 90s.
Eventually, they came up with a stellar app OS: Suse. But they never got the business side pointed straight.
In the end, I would say Microsoft won for the strangest reason of all. They gave their desktop OS and their server OS the same name. And even though everyone that mattered knew they weren't the same, it somehow mattered that the desktop OS had such large market share.
Because Netware failed to catch the TCP/IP wave, but Suse caught it. But Windows servers could run Windows apps and Linux could not. And Novell never figured out to go all-in on Linux as an app server. The business side never made the leap. Well, at least not in time.
I think the difference is more Windows 3.x and 9x versions that many were more familiar with. When your computer runs "windows", and your workstation runs "windows", why not also have your servers run "windows.
Agreed. But it was pretty clear that the world needed more than File Servers and Print Servers. NLMs weren't a clear path forward, either. We needed app servers. Desktops and workstations ran apps. Servers ran... well, servers. Windows could run both and so could Unix. Netware? Not really.
Of course that was a junior high understanding of software. But such odd views mattered. You could run Groupwise email or Oracle on Netware, but it felt off. You could write a Perl script and have it run in Apache and talk to sendmail on Linux. You could run a VisualBasic app on Windows and have it talk to Sybase and cc:Mail.
Maybe that VB app ran on a client, but the distinction between a client and a server could get blurry. Client-server apps became n-tier apps. Windows could do that. Netware really couldn't. Unix could do it amazingly. And not just Linux.
Redhat had this vision. Suse had it pre-Novell. Some people at Novell had it. But corporate vision is a challenge. And Netware was a champion. It is hard for humans to throw away the horse that made you a king and jump onto some other horse. Especially if you have to convince your customers to stay in your saddle.
It wasn't easy for Microsoft either. There was that whole OS/2 thing and LanManager and all kinds of awkward. The path forward was super murky for everyone in 1992. And Microsoft failed again and again against Netware.
But Netware really lost to BSDs and Linux as an app server. And *nix eventually lost to Windows as a directory server. By the time Novell got around to hosting their best-in-class directory server on a capable app server, it was too late. AD got good enough before anybody else put something as good as NDS on Unix. And of course, Windows clients had built in support that nobody outside was ever going to match as far as GPO capabilities.
All that said, history isn't over. The world is still waiting for a better client app server than Windows or Android. Or at least a better ecosystem. It isn't going to come from Redhat. It hasn't come from Google yet. There is room for a client OS with great Directory integration to take over enterprise computing. It won't be easy, but the right vision could pair with the right marketing to create a new winner. Funny enough, the biggest obstacle to that would be replacing AD.
Netware 3 and later loaded from DOS. It couldn't boot itself; it started by running an EXE file from DOS. (Netware 2.x was the last version that could cold-boot itself from hard disk.)
But it didn't have to run on DOS. It later supported loading on OS/2 as well.
Then your Netware server was a process running under a multitasking OS.
Result, non-dedicated Netware server that could run server apps right alongside Netware with its famed performance, quite a few years before the first PC hypervisor was implemented. Now this is easy; in the 1990s it was next to impossible.
But neither IBM nor Novell saw this as the potential killer feature it could have been.
If IBM had bought Novell (instead of Red Hat), or Novell had licensed a cut-down OS/2 and bundled it with Netware as the host OS... :shrug:
Instead, it bolted a new filesystem onto Netware, added an X11 server, added Java, and tried to piecemeal turn Netware into a Unix-a-like non-dedicated server OS... which turned it into a bit of a bloated mess, and destroyed Netware's lean, mean elegance.
Same here got my CNE when I was 13 and managed a law firm’s network. NetWare was rock solid and their permission model was…easy enough a child could manage it!
So I never worked with Novell, but I remember reading somewhere that child objects didn't contain a full ACL, so on every object load the FS tree would be walked and each parent ACL checked? Is that the case? So in direct contrast to the ntSecurityDescriptor storing the entire ACL on every object.
If so, with SSDs now, I can't see it being a massive performance problem nowadays no? I do certainly dislike sitting at the Windows ACL screen for 20 minutes while it goes through recursively to update child ACLs.
I remember that Doom had IPX network support but not IP. My roommate and I first played each other with a serial cable and null modem adapter. It look like TCP/IP support came later.
Some of the first LAN parties I participated in included Doom over IPX, using 10BASE2 ethernet adapters... in fact I just now put a BNC connector from those days down on my desk.
The first version of Doom caused IPX network meltdowns because it used the broadcast address on every Ethernet packet, thus triggering a huge number of interrupts on every node.
Ah yes, the memories of early LAN parties before switches and cat5. You would configure a network with 5(0?) ohm terminators in both ends. When someone had to leave had to break the bnc wire and start all over. It could really hurt is you disconnected the network and touched the centre of the coax cable.
I grew up with token ring/ AS400 / OS2, so NetWare was always foreign and exotic to me.
Yes I think it was. But back in those days enabling ipx on Windows was just a checkbox in the network settings so it wasn't hard to use it for lan parties.
I remember when our sales team sold a large customer with the commitment our product could run over IPX and let us know... at implementation. That was a fun weekend.
Netware was awesome, so much well thought out functionality. Their TUIs were well thought out for large scale admin. Had things like salvage of deleted files I haven’t seen so easy to use since.
Eventually lost out to more general purpose OSs, first NT then Linux and the internet.
At some point they ported IP, then X Window and Java to it, which blew my mind, but it was unfortunately too little too late.
Netware holds a very fond place in my heart even if the memories are fuzzy. The server was light weight and crazily stable, the client applications were fully featured and the documentation extensive. I've got a boxed copy of 3.11 somewhere and (whilst I'm probably remembering this wrong), I'm convinced the server was only two disks to install (iirc it still chain-loaded from DOS at that point), the client software only 4 disks but the documentation took 8 or 10.
I also remember being obsessed with the Snake screensaver as a kid; if I remember right then you got a snake on screen per CPU core with the length of the snake indicating the load. I was always disappointed I couldn't find a windows or linux equivalent.
Just because they're on different sockets... IIRC Dual-CPU P2 motherboards were pretty popular though I don't remember what was in the Netware servers where I first noticed the screensaver.
Microfocus also owned SUSE and I was amazed, when I joined SUSE in 2017, to find that there was zero integration between openSUSE/SLE and NDS.
As an old Netware sysadmin in the '80s and '90s, I expected to install my new machine, give it my NDS credentials and have it automatically installed and populated and configured, just as I had NT 4 workstations doing with Zenworks, 20 years before.
But no. SUSE did things the Linux way and the main visible effects of being owned by Novell were some WLAN names and so on, corporate Groupwise email, and that was all.
>After several attempts to cut in failed, Microsoft entered merger talks with Novell's chief, Ray Noorda. Noorda discovered Bill Gates was maneuvering behind his back even as they spoke, and became infuriated.
