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.'"

Comments

Unused for the last 8 years

[artbristol]

From the linked thread:
"When I began work here in 2004, this system was completely orphaned ... The only thing it's been connected to since 2004 has been my personal computer (laptop)."
Way to spend (by my reckoning) 10,000 kWh of electricity.

Re:Netware 3

[girlinatrainingbra]

You can run Knoppix like this also, with everything stored in ram using the "to ram" command line option when booting up: knoppix lang=us toram no3d

This works better for the CD-sized version of knoppix if you have only one-Gig of RAM, if you've got more than 6GB RAM, go ahead and use "toram" for the DVD-sized versions of Knoppix.

Re:patch much

[The Second Horseman]

Essentially - other than tunneling IPX over TCP/IP, which the site may or may not have been using - this version of Netware had no TCP/IP support. No web server, no nothing. Odds are this this wasn't much of a risk. My guess (the article didn't say) is that they were using it for something really specific.

Re:Time to go indeed

[Bert64]

Once a drive starts failing like that, the worst thing you can do is reboot the box... The drive may continue running for years, but if you shut it off it may never be able to spin up again.
Best thing is to get any important data off the drive without shutting it down.

Re:Seriously?

[isorox]

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.

We ran an IPX-based public internet in the 90s

[billstewart]

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.