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NetWare 3.12 Server Taken Down After 16 Years of Continuous Duty

Posted by samzenpus on from the served-us-well dept.

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.'"

10 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Netware 3 by HornWumpus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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'
    1. Re:Netware 3 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I doubt the drives were exactly 'up'. Spinning, yes.

      I had a legacy Netware 3.11 server once upon a time... it was up for years and years, and by the time I got to the company it was like a legend. Eventually though there was a power outtage that outstripped the UPS system and required a re-start.

      It wouldn't load. We sent the hard drives out to be recovered and they didn't actually exist anymore - the surface had been work away years before, and the server had been running purely in RAM.

      Netware was awesome.

    2. Re:Netware 3 by cyberthanasis12 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The thing that I liked most with netware 3.1* was the fantastic undelete it had. It never really erased anything unless it was out of storage. Once I remember I undeleted a file I had erased one month before. And the undelete was no hassle at all. You just looked at a list of the "erased" files and chose whichever you wanted. It's the only thing I (still) miss since I migrated to Linux in 1999.

    3. Re:Netware 3 by HornWumpus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Salvage was one of the best new features of Netware 3. That and not having to gen sys from 360K floppies.

      On netmare 2 the first thing you did when you got your first one up was put a copy of the install images on the share. Linking up (IIRC they called it genning sys) a copy of the server required you to feed it each of about 20 floppies three times each in apparently random order. Get one interrupt wrong and you get to start over (better to reset the interrupt jumpers to match the config you had).

      I should not remember any of this crap.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    4. Re:Netware 3 by MavenW · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I got a call from an acquaintance who was a low level runner for a law firm. He asked if there was any way to resurrect files that had been deleted by a disgruntled employee who was laid off. She deleted a ton of important stuff. They didn't have any backups and were in a panic. I told him salvage might work, and explained how to get to it.

      He was a hero that day.

    5. Re:Netware 3 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You're right - no contact. What the drive recovery people told us was that there was a leak in the casing, and enough outside, unfiltered air/pollution got in that over the years the disk surface was worn away by that.

  2. 1989 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:patch much by rickb928 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Most of the patches I applied to 3.12 didn't require a reboot, and those that did didn't require shutting down the power. Such requirements as reboots are uncivilized.

    --
    deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
  4. Re:Unused for the last 8 years by fnj · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Kids nowadays. No sense of adventure and wonder. Best use of 10,000 kWh ever.

  5. Re:Time to go indeed by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I bought the 'spare parts' for the hard drive I most recently repaired on Ebay.

    I had a failed 200g Maxtor drive. It had a lot of important stuff on it that I wanted back. It failed in such a fashion that it just quit spinning entirely so I gambled that it was an electrical problem on the logic board. I went on eBay and searched until I found exactly the same Maxtor drive, even down to the firmware version. It's nice that they have the zoom-able pictures on eBay and that many sellers post high resolution pictures.

    It got me the data back perfectly. The repaired drive even works, though I'm leery about using it any longer.