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NetWare 3.12 Server Taken Down After 16 Years of Continuous Duty
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica's Peter Bright reports on a Netware 3.12 server that has been decommissioned after over 16 years of continuous operation. The plug was pulled when noise from the server's hard drives become intolerable. From the article: 'It's September 23, 1996. It's a Monday. The Macarena is pumping out of the office radio, mid-way through its 14 week run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, doing little to improve the usual Monday gloom...Sixteen and a half years later, INTEL's hard disks—a pair of full height 5.25 inch 800 MB Quantum SCSI devices—are making some disconcerting noises from their bearings, and you're tired of the complaints. It's time to turn off the old warhorse.'"
Netware 3 ruled.
Netmare 2 on the other hand earned the name.
By version 5 it was back to Netmare (for different reasons).
I once walked into a dusty environment, remote location and could hear the drive bearings from 100 feet away through a fire door. Backed up successfully but never spun up again.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/
I'd be more impressed if they booted UP Colossus after decades of DOWNTIME.
Netware 3.12 was quite secure and rock solid. It did one thing (file and print serving) very, very well. It's a testament to good software design. The fact that you make light of it probably indicates that you were not in the IT field back then and have no sense of perspective. I wasn't a huge Netware fan, being more of an OS/2 and Unix guy back in the day, but I had a great deal of respect for the product.
then it was 112 years old in human equivalents.
Must've had a steady diet of green tea and yogurt...
Netware 6.5 is the new kid on the block. This is a testament as much to the hard disks as it is to netware. Wonder if any of today's blazing fast drives will stay up 16 years ...even if using netware 3.x
So pretty much they left a box running for 16 years without any updates that required a reboot. Oddly I expect there were a few missed security patches. Can not say for sure I was already running linux on the desktop and servers at that time.
No sir I dont like it.
Last year, I worked next to a system with DOS and IBM BASIC that has been up continuously on a production line since 1989, mind you, it was in a protective box with special filters and 90% of it's "functionality" is no longer used.
16 years and they did not run of space on it?
also good hardware not to fail in some way other that time. Did they hot swap UPS batteries over the years as well?
Novell asked people to send screen shots of their uptimes. http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/103.html The winner then had an uptime of about 6 years.
You know those little squiggly red lines under words you type? I think they're trying to tell you something.
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
Isn't the point that you just used the word "was quite secure ...", and not "is quite secure"?
The star is the hard disks. 16 years working, whereas nowadays you look at them wrong and they go kaput.
So? Is there some rule requiring every tech website to report unique content?
I don't follow Arstechnica, so I'm glad that having been on Arstechnica doesn't disqualify something from being on slashdot.
From the linked thread: ... The only thing it's been connected to since 2004 has been my personal computer (laptop)."
"When I began work here in 2004, this system was completely orphaned
Way to spend (by my reckoning) 10,000 kWh of electricity.
But doesnt SCSI support hot plugging? Drive replacement should be an option, even if a non-optimal one.
You read /. for news? Why that's adorable!
so your product does not yet exist?
Unrelated, but I misread your signature as "when she was besetting us with donuts."
"are making some disconcerting noises from their bearings"
Rule 1 about hard disks.
When the hard disk starts making funny noises it hasn't made before(especially after 10+ years), its time to start looking for a new hard drive, failure is imminent.
...sixteen years of operation is ordinary. It's sad that this considered outstanding for a router.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This story, coupled with the story of the shutting down of a long running Sparc system a few weeks back simply point to the fact that since the pretty boy n girls of the MBA world conned their way into the tech world and quite literally coopted the industry, every thing produced for the last 15 years is just crap.
I have very fond memories of 3.12, running a few site servers in the US, Mexico and Honduras. Although installing or patching was a pain with boxes of floppies to feed in to the server. It did what I asked it to do.
When I first looked at IPv6 addresses I had an IPX flashback. When we transitioned to IP from IPX (and to NT 4) I thought "these numbers seem finite compared to what is possible in IPX."
Whatever happened to the "Old Novell Guys" website from the late '90's? I am one. /Sorry if I am rambling.
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
Please apply security updates and reboot to get them active at least once a month. Or at least a quarter if it is complicated. But 16 years is without security updates is horrible.
Put that old war horse down easy, it did it's duty and then some, it deserves some respect.
I loved Netware and worked on 2.x, 3.x and 4.x, it's a real shame what's become of Novell.
Is the order of magnitude these heads have traveled (in a circle).
8000rpm x 60 x 24 x 365 x 16 x (5.25/2/2)*pi x 12 x 5280
This was a NetWare 3.12 box and...
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
I would say thats testament to what quality once was. Try getting even 6 years out of current hard drives. Now everything has this planned obsolescence by manufacturers, since they want to sell you again soon as possible...
One of my clients ran PosgreSQL on their NetWare 3.12 server for years for an insurance agency app. No downtime, no app errors, not even abends.
Another ran the Advantage database engine through 2000. We had a 15 minute call 0002 EST when the app failed ot reload, and before I could get off the call the Y2K patch was in my inbox. Up at 0015, no further problems.
NetWare was my favorite server OS. Miss it still. Only Debian makes servers tolerable for me.
Security seemed to be a nonissue. Nearly every patch I recall was to secure the console - sitting at the keyboard was a prerequiste. Nothing like Windows NT.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It's slower but more than fast enough, supports printers too although you'll really miss those Novell print queues. And Lantastic has evolved too, you are no longer limited to Arcnet, it supports the *new* 10baseT half duplex cards! Patches are available for the DOS stack to accommodate just about any combination of hardware IRQ and base IO PORT. Just be sure to load the network TSRs BEFORE you run Borland Sidekick.
Whoa! I was having 1984 flashbacks for a moment.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Are you saying that every channel on the TV should show the same program?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
âoeNetWare 3.12 Server Taken Down After 16 Years ...â
Required a wooden stake.
I don't follow Arstechnica
What a shame. You're missing out on what Slashdot used to be.
when i worked for a furniture companies MIS department back in 2004 we had a 3.12 server that had not been powered off since 1991, it might have been rebooted but power was never dropped.... till the day i overloaded a UPS after plugging a printer into the wrong power outlet (didn't notice the extension cord was on the UPS) and dropped power to all the devices on it. (our 486 3.12 server, and our AS/400 Midrange), we were worried as those hard drives where running for 13 years straight and where never powered down. when power was restored, all was back working. although we also had a linux pc doing novel netware logins and fileshares (Marse_NWE) at the time too as the netware server hit its max user logins (25 users). sigh i miss those days, although i do not miss the 3hour boot times for the as/400
Geeks argue passionately about green energy, electric cars, energy efficient light bulbs, and zero populations growth, but asking them to be energy efficient when it comes to computing is too much of a sacrifice.
Software outliving it's hardware... sigh.
There's something innately human about that which strikes me as... odd.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
Good software.
Good software ships in boxes and doesn't require Internet connectivity. Physical boxes cost a fortune, so what's in the box has to fucking work the first time, and forevermore after it ships, because its developers built it knowing that it might never be updated.
It's not very agile, but it worked. (Corollary: It's not very agile, and that's why it worked.)
I wasn't long ago that I was in a government computing facility. I was having a conversation with one of the old long beards in the NOC about the different technologies at the facility. Of in a distant forgotten corner of the center, he showed me an old dusty VAX still chugging along after who knows how many decades. It was small and blue, a little taller than a small beer fridge. The funny thing was, everyone new it was there, but absolutely no one had any idea what is was doing. It just sat there humming along wait for a vacuum tube to blow.
Why, did IPX have any layer 3 addressing mechanisms?
... How many nines is 16 years of continuous duty? And how many times your beloved "six nines" is that?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Go back to patching your windows boxes and leave the discussion to people who know about this OS.
This was on Arstechnica like 3 days ago. This site is increasingly feeding on news carrion.
This site has been doing that for years.
There's still no other site with the quality of exta information you get from the comments.
It would have had you update and reboot 1664 times in that time span. You would have torn those old obsolete drives out long before they failed. That's the key advantage of Ubuntu.
What ever happend to the Open source NetWare ? I was never clear if it was a clone or not.
Now the other question I have is, why would anyone run it?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
That's a nice strawman you've got there - it's such a shame it has to go up in flames!
Of course every channel on TV shouldn't show the same programming, just like every website on the internet shouldn't report the same stories. But if one news report on TV covers a particular story, that doesn't mean it's wrong for a TV news report on a different channel (which might have a different audience) to cover the same story. Same with websites.
Of course I'm impressed at the uptime (but then, it's netware). What I'm _really_ impressed about is that:
* The organization or dept is still around 16 years later.
* It hasn't moved anywhere.
* The UPS that backs it is still going (I hope there was a UPS?)
* The building power never had to be switched off for an extended period of time
* There were no other environmental disturbances.
What are the odds? Let me count back to 1996 (here in silicon valley), to the various places I've worked:
* SGI is dead (modulo its re-animated corpse moving around the valley)
* A variety of startups are dead, or acquired
* Even HP has downsized/moved its departments around (the one where I worked no longer exists).
* Other companies have moved around as they grew or shrank.
I can't think of a single place around here where such a feat could even be attempted.
He should have used a HOSTS file to block the unwanted sound from the hard drives. Or better yet run CleanMyPC to get those bearings running in tip-top shape. Bob's your Uncle!
Oddly, I replaced my main home server with a highly energy efficient model four years ago (mac mini). I was using a kill-a-watt meter to measure that I was spending > $100/year on the old server, and that was a significant factor on what to get as a replacement. All my other systems are energy efficient laptops at home. I use the kill-a-watt regularly to test devices suspected of burning excess power.
Are there things I don't do? Of course. But I hardly ignore energy efficiency. I also make sure I'm not getting a low energy number that I will never make up the cost of over the life of the equipment. So that hybrid car? No go. I don't drive enough miles to justify the surcharge.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
I always was rather impressed with those Quantum drives. I had a Quantum 1.2GB hdd in my computer when we suffered a house fire, and that drive was the only piece of electronics to survive in usable condition. Indeed, it lasted a good 4 or 5 years beyond that.
Dyolf Knip
Funny you mention OS/2, you'd load the OS/2 namespace module on Netware 3.12 in order to get long file name support.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
Netware was fine at the time since it did not have to work with TCP/IP and had not connection to internet. As soon as we tried running Oracle server on it we got a bunch of errors, spontaneous reboots and file corruption. Not fun at all. Netware at the time did not have memory protection nor swapping. Memory corruption in one process could bring the whole system down. Any process trying to allocate more memory than was available would also crash. Netware was unsuitable for anything more than file and printer sharing.
Our Oracle on Netware story ended couple months later when we moved Oracle to a non-Netware host. File sharing services followed few months later. It was the last Netware server that I saw.
I inherited two 3.12 servers at my current place of employment. I started in '04, got rid of one in '06. The other is around for 'legacy data' for accounting and for a certification program we need for finished goods. They were installed in '93. I have had two major hardware failures since I started and used the parts from the second server to nurse this one along. The current plan, green lighted last Wednesday, is to virtualize it on to a 'nix box, but we are still going to keep it, probably until the end of time.....
"...a civilian some of the time, a soldier part of the time and a patriot all of the time." -Brig. Gen. James Drain
I was a Netware admin from '286 to 4.11. Anyone remember burglar.nlm lol.
Secure my ass, bindery hacks were easy. On more then one occasion I have had to recover admin passwords after disgruntled employees left.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
All of these replies about Novell Netware, and yet I haven't see one single mention of where Novell is today, how NDS came to be known as eDirectory, how Netware was ripped out and slapped on top of Linux under the name SuSe Enterprise Linux, which is totally free to download almost every product they ship and use on your own home network in an uncrippled fashion (so long as you don't want to security updates via a 30 day trial).
Anyways, cheers Novell, you will be missed o/ ;|
"There's still no other site with the quality of exta information you get from the comments."
This. Pretty much the only reason I'm still here.
On Fark you get pictures.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
Also, the NetWare documentation was awesome. Whatever problem or question you had, the answer was in those red books.
Only on slashdot you can laugh about silly comments, learn from really insightful ones AND learn about how HOSTS file can save your life and that APK posting as AC was impersonated by another Anonymous Coward!
Tomorrow is another day...
The first time I studied for the Cisco CCNA exam, in the mid-2000s or so, it still had questions about how to configure Netware IPX. Unfortunately, they wouldn't accept the right answer, which was "Tell the users that Netware has supported TCP/IP since Version 5, and if they're still running IPX it's time to upgrade their software." :-)
But one thing I did like about IPv6 was the IPX-like address autoconfiguration. On the other hand, when DHCP came out, it did autoconfiguration just about as easily, and the IPv6 folks seem to have decided "Oh, boy, we get to add all the features anybody thought of that weren't in DHCPv4" so there's a mess of Router Advertisements and different flavors of DHCPv6s and it's not clear that you can get all the capabilities you want from just one protocol. (And EUI64 is gratuitously uglier than just using the MAC address, though I understand why you'd want to bite the bullet now and use 64-bit instead of 48-bit MACs.) And most client-only implementations these days are using IPv6 address privacy extensions when they can, which is a really good thing.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
IPX addresses had two parts - a 4-byte network number and a 6-byte host number that was almost always the MAC address. The network number was locally assigned, and in practice was almost always 00:00:00:00 (the default local network, because almost nobody actually bothered with routing), or FF:FF:FF:FF (broadcast), though some people got fancy and actually split up their networks into routed segments 1,2,3 etc. instead of bridging.
So you could theoretically run an Internet-like network on it if there were some central authority assigning network numbers instead of everybody rolling their own, and it would scale better than IPv4 because there were 32 bits of network number!
AT&T ran an IPX public internet in the mid/late 90s, in coordination with Novell. We assigned public network numbers, and sold connections. By now I've forgotten exactly what years it was, and I wasn't organizationally close enough to it to know if they actually got many customers, and of course there weren't really a lot of applications for it, but it probably ran for about two years.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Just a correction for JSG's post - the IPX address had two parts, a 32-bit network address and a 48-bit host address. SPX was separate - it's the Netware Layer 4 protocol that's roughly equivalent to TCP. IPX network addresses were locally administered, not globally, and most people just used the default network address of 0 (i.e. 00:00:00:00) and if they had multiple LANs they bridged them rather than routing, though some people got fancy and assigned network numbers 1,2,3, etc. the way they currently assign RFC1918 addresses themselves. The host address was almost always a MAC address (or broadcast.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Netware was considerably stronger than Windows security at the time. Once sitting at the console, it pretty easy, other than a MONITOR.NLM password. Resetting the bindery Supervisor password was pretty simple by loading SETSPASS.NLM or SETSPWD.NLM. Or NW4.x NDS SETPWD.NLM
Direct bindery hacks were much more complicated and still required console access to either get access to the NET$OBJ.SYS, NET$PROP.SYS, NET$VAL.SYS files in 3.x.
Area51 - We are watching...
I have a question. Does anyone know whether Novell ever considered porting Netware to any computer platform other than Intel based servers? I mean, there were all the Unix/RISC companies like Sun, SGI, IBM, HP, DEC and so on, so did Novell ever consider porting Netware to any of them, given that they were all based on the server market? Had they done that, there would have been a common OS for all these platforms, instead of fragmented Unixes, such as Solaris, Irix, Ultrix and so on.
Before E-Directory was NDS. Anybody remember what came before that? Anybody? Anybody?
fire 4
What are you talking about, NetWare isn't even remotely related to Unix.