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

Netware 3

[HornWumpus]

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.

Re:Netware 3

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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:Netware 3

[cyberthanasis12]

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.

Re:Netware 3

[GovCheese]

On the other side of an office door, I heard the worst noise I've ever heard from spinning drives and in my panic, didn't even see the "do not disturb" sign. Turns out it wasn't spinning drives I was hearing. The lactating woman on the other side of the door milking herself with a noisy pump nearly threw the infernal machine at me. Some things are not meant to be seen.

Re:Netware 3

[HornWumpus]

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.

Re:Netware 3

[MavenW]

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.

Re:Netware 3

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Was it discovered in the wall??

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/

Re:Is this supposed to be a good thing?

[dreamchaser]

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.

1989

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

[Joe_Dragon]

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?

Re:16 years and they did not run of space on it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to piss of pompous, holier-than-thou assholes like yourself. Mission accomplished!

Re:patch much

[Anonymous Coward]

"My linux systems require constant patching for them not to be p0wned by script kiddies. Therefore it follows that every other system is the same.".

Love that logic.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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:Unused for the last 8 years

[fnj]

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

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:patch much

[93 Escort Wagon]

My guess (the article didn't say) is that they were using it for something really specific.

It's pretty obvious the only thing they were using it for was to watch the runtime go up and up.

The drive bearings had been noticeably failing for quite some time. The operators might pay some lip service as to why that somehow didn't matter, but the bottom line is - if the risk of a drive failure during operation isn't a problem, the machine isn't serving any real purpose.

Re:Novell's Top Uptime Contest - 2001

[93 Escort Wagon]

I've run across a few Netware "sysadmins" who thought maintaining the longest uptime possible was their primary job duty.

I used to know some Linux guys like that as well, but in that case they were kids and didn't know any better.

Time to install... Lantastic!

[TheRealHocusLocus]

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.

Re:patch much

[rickb928]

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.

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:IPX & IPv6

[desertfool]

Kind of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internetwork_Packet_Exchange

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.

Re:patch much

[popoutman]

There was a patch for SuSE recently to fix a 208-day bug, where certain CPU registers on a particular CPU would hold their value through a reboot. We patched servers in work, and they still fell over at various times past 208 days of uptime. It was then realised that there was a need to fully cold-boot the affected servers for the condition to clear correctly.
So, that was one example of a patch that required shutting down the power.

Re:Time to go indeed

[Bing Tsher E]

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.

Re:IPX & IPv6

[JSG]

Yes. It was called SPX (Sequenced Packet eXchange). You had an IPX address which is basically a MAC address and you preface that with a colon (:) and a six hex char SPX address.

The SPX address is roughly analogous to an IP subnet. The IPX address would be the individual IP host address. Note that the protocol doesn't stop you from repeating the full IPX range on each SPX network, you would have to override the automatic MAC address to IPX address assignment which would be unwieldy.

I suspect that a full modern internet running on IPX/SPX style addressing would look a little different from what we used back in the day. It might look rather more like IPv6 perhaps ...

Cheers
Jon

Re:Seriously?

[gagol]

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!

Re:Continuos?

[inject_hotmail.com]

You know those little squiggly red lines under words you type? I think they're trying to tell you something.

No, no, that's the name of the OS.

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.