Early 90's LAN Party with Novell NetWare 4
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- Опубликовано: 30 июл 2024
- In this video I decided to put the 286 machines on the bench.
Not for repairs, but for an old fashioned LAN party.
Netware 4 seemed like a nice choice for setting. upa little retro LAN.
Look at how I prepare the 286 machines for networking using original Novell Netware cards, hook them up to a Novell NetWare 4server, share some files and play some games.
Other channels mentioned here
NCommander : / ncommander
RetroTechChris: / retrotechchris
RetroBytes : / @retrobytesuk
#novell #LAN #networking 
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Love it! My first real IT job was at a marketing company. They had a bunch of 486's, a Microsoft LAN Manager network running on coax, and I had the keys to the building.
We made some boot disks that were basically the IPX/SPX drivers and an autoexec that launched doom off a share. Would hand a disk to each friend, we'd go pick a desk, and have lan parties every night at work! Good times, good times. Thinking back on it, the owners of the company were NUTS to give an 18yr old the keys to the building AND the network! We never did anything malicious, but I'm sure the power bill was slightly higher from our antics.
I used to host LAN parties an my in 1996, we used netware with thin net cables. (BNC) or AUI port with adapter for RJ45.
We played games like Rise of the triad, Doom, Duke Nukem. It was a blast. Each computer had to use the same network ID, but different Host ID's. I bought the cards from a used computer store for $20 each, which was pretty pricey back then. New cards at that time were around $100. I kept the cards at my house and installed them when people would bring their machines over.
Made my evening to read this: I have just a little experience watching my co-workers annihilate each other after hours with Doom and ROTT, which were both being tested at the time (with Duke still a work in progress). I wasn't as experienced as they, so I was easy cannon fodder and ultimately lost interest in playing head-to-head. However, to show where I was working, I'm still getting mileage out of that "Die!" that you hear from my Low Guard character in ROTT. 🙂
I've still got my Netware 4 CDs from a seminar I attended in Austin. Never had much luck with it -- NT was coming, that's where the money was -- but I did have some experience with Netware 3 and Cheyenne ARCserve.
One advantage to being in Belgium is that you don't have to scroll far down the location list lol.
Thanks for the shout out! This is one cool set up here. I definitely had some fun setting up IBM Classroom LAN Administration System with Novell NetWare, it was a throwback to my high school days :)
I remember netwars. We played it at uni. Studying the Doppler effect in taking and dealing hits between two players in frontal attack (one flying defensive backwards and winning, one flying aggressively forward and losing because the hits came in quicker) was our excuse.
I remember lan parties where we forgot the BNC termination cap and tried to replace it with a resistance. whole nights playing Doom then Doom 2. great memories!
Man this is WILD. A system so prolific that now all but forgotten from public consciousness. Appreciate you documenting this piece of history!
Awesome! I worked at Novell in the late 90’s, & among other things, converted all the legacy gold masters to digital deliverables.
Very cool! I never saw Novel Network running in my life to be honest. Null-Modems and IPX later, but never the Novel thing. Probably, because it was expensive and reserved for commercial users and companies. Anyways that was very exciting, thank you very much. And also mentioning the other channels, which made some video on that topic was a really fair move and very informative as well. Thumbs up!
I seem to remember that Personal Netware came free with later versions of DR_DOS. It came with Netwars included.
@2:59. You can disable the coax port in Lieu of enabling the AUI port. You move all the jumpers located at W1 through W8 to the up position, then you install a aui to 10baseT adapter which will give you the same capability. Love the fact you are covering Novell Netware. It was the premier networking solution in the 90's before Microsoft took over with Active Directory.
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Great video! I was a Certified Novell Administrator back in the day. This brings back some great memories. Long live NetWare !
Yes! Thank you for doing more older networking stuff it's why I subscribed early on. I started my career in the later 2000s so there were still some vague elements from older systems but seeing this stuff first hand is amazing insight that helps even today! Thank you!
Here because of The Net with Sandra Bullock. They are reading the book Novell Netware 4 in the mall right near the end :)
Aaah Netwars. We played Descent and Doom on the school network for hours and never got caught because the screen monitoring TSR did not work in protected mode. But the 10 minute round of Netwars did us in and the sysadmin *gleefully* stormed in and announced a week long ban.
As they say, power corrupts...
Friday afternoon “bandwidth testing” 😂
Do you know of ways of connecting two computers on IPX protocol on MSDOS over the internet? Some other method other than Hamachi + Dosbox native IPX? Maybe some Linux project? There's this game M.A.X. (Mechanized Assault Exploration) people have been trying to connect online for years. Help appreciated =D
@@FeelingShred you can’t. IPX isn’t routable
@@carbonunit3191 We were succesful connecting the game on 2 computers over the net with Dosbox' built-in IPX emulation inside a Hamachi network. But the results were bad, the game would work very slow while it was connected (it's a turn based game, it's not a game centered around real-time framerates, mind you) and the connection would not last long, at the end of turn 2 the connection would be interrupted, and we couldn't connect back up again. I would love to have some old DOS machines lying around to test if this happens on real hardware too.
I'm really waiting for COAX + DOS IPX multiplayer gaming setup from you! :)
Ohhh~ for a solid minute my old job used Novell to deploy software, definitely a newer version though I imagine, several years ago now.
Thanks for posting, Ive been curious about this for years. :]
Some memories should be left in the ground not dug up! Just checked my old "don't throw away" box of disks, yup I still have a 50 user license diskette for Netware 4.11 that I paid a mint for back in the late 90's for my home network... back when I was actively working as a CNA. I almost miss seeing IPX broadcast storms on the wire.
Feel free to send them over :) 4.11 works in virtual box but had to abandon it because I didn’t have any license :)
Great to see these old computers from the older videos back again. Hopefully whoever you sell them to will also give them a good home!
Memories comming up... :-)
Starting with Netware 2.x I remember the "diskprep" program running 8 to 10 hours on a 80 mb disk and the cleaning stuff that just unplugged the server for the vacuum cleaner, the customer that run out of disk space and deleted the "double" files on Y: and Z:, the Novell Lite for home use where you could generate your own licenses by editing 3 bytes,... Memories, memories... :-)
X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter would be a fantastic game to run on a home LAN like this! That was something I always wanted to do but we never got that advanced in home networking until long past that era. By then we were almost always playing Age of Empires II.
Awe the fond memories of bouncing my head off of the desk screaming WHY???? JUST WORK! IRQ's and I/O Address were such a fun thing... Lol
BNC was the first lan I ever setup in my house for me and the kids. I went to a Star Trek convention with a friend and we found out that there was going to be a lan party there too so we took our computers along. It was awesome, there was BNC cable running up and down the hallways and into almost every room on 2 floors. NetWars was one of the games we played but I can't remember any others sad to say. Awesome time for sure. I can believe the hotel let us get away with it, 3 years in a row... LOL
Thanks for the memories and fun video!
Great video..informative & even a small mini course in Novell....I hope to see more in the future ;-)
Fantastic video! Thank you!
Looking forward to watching your coaxial cable and BNC bus topology networking video.
When you do that, please also cover networking using the MAC Address layer Net Beui Protocol.
People don't know that it is possible to network up to 10 computer using just the MAC address of those computer and no IP addresses.
And that is a secure network that can not be hacked by outsiders who use an IP addresses 😊
In my younger days, I supported a couple small Novell networks. Those coax cables/T-connectors bring back memories (some of them actually good - hehehe).
Oh wow! I have so many fond memories of the setup you showed here - networking 386 and 486 machines in DOS using Netware 4.11 with NE2000 cards and coax cabling. And then you HAD to show Netwars and I just about melted. I have so many fond memories of this game. Thank you so much for this video!
Mannnnnn this takes me back!
My first networking certification was in Novell Netware. So many memories!
Thank you for sharing!
Nice video! I never setup a Novell network myself but it looks pretty easy. That being said I'm perfectly fine with my NT 4.0 Server setup for my older clients. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for this video, brings back lots of memories :) use to love playing with Peer to Peer networks and the BNC connectors
Great stuff! Thanks again for documenting history.
The thing I remember about netware was it had decently low memory use on machines with only 1mb or less. VS the TCP/NetBios stack that used almost more base ram than any computer ever had.
I absolutely love your videos and your machines. That Acer 915P looks so elegant, I could imagine to put modern hardware into this and use it as a daily driver. Nowadays everything is just black and has lots of unnecessary and annoying RGB Leds in it, I absolutely hate it.
Admin’d Novell for years. Loved it and great memories
Very nice! I was a Novell CNE 3, 4 and 5 back in the day... still loved NetWare... best file and print out there. I still love this product, even though it is very legacy. I still have plenty of manuals and disks... NetWare 4 was a big change to eDirectory from the old Binary database.
I'm surprised you can still find Novell. I had to take a class learning how it work and how to use it back in the early 2000's while attending DeVry University in Colorado Springs, CO. Cool video.
funny story for novell..... in highschool(2001-2002ish) one of the teachers had a Athlon XP desktop with a ECS K7S5A board, when he upgraded it became one of the random class computers and having had 2 of them myself when the capacitors(G-Luxon) went back it would stop detecting the ide/pata drives; with that it would cycle through the bios's boot list and the board had ?novell netware client? built into the bios, the teacher not knowing this seriously thought one of us installed it on the computer for "hacking" and he threatened to not let us into his room during lunch till one of us fixed/removed it..... although we successfully got it to boot after resetting the bios, sadly he still didn't believe us:S(eternally smh)
** recapping the board would fix this issue, but the board in my opinion wasn't really worth it, least at the time; mediocre Athlon XP board that did not support S3 sleep mode, it's one pro was that is supported a modified bios that allowed for higher FSB
he could literally see when the path was created. the fuck?
@@pauliewalnuts2527 ** when public school hires the cheapest mediocre teacher to do the job(he taught the football team and a computer filler options class)
@@plasmar1 skill is not a factor. in truth it comes down to what the school board can afford. often its better to get the extra teacher on a specialty on the cheap than the quality of teacher.
bitch about the police having new cars every year if you want better teachers. maybe if they weren't trting to lock up every tom dick and harry we could afford some better teachers who have the skill and experience to choose where they teach.
but that doesnt directly profit the ones giving kick backs to politicians who some how keep getting elected because the D next to their name means they care huh?
@@plasmar1 but i feel we need to have computers be as important as english or science. its not enough that they can upload to a social media. modern kids are actually very computer illiterate except for the prompts given to them. as bad as a boomer half the time, can even change their hop limit.
great job...i love seeing you do this...
Brings back some good memory. 😊👍
I remember we used to have 2 day LAN meets, the first day for me was taken up fixing computers and BNC cables as I was the computer guy all while they gamed and drank beer. Good times :)
We played all these IPX/ODI bnc network back around 1994/95. It was a fun time, sharing files through Win3.11 and gaming Doom and Descent against each others.
Do you know of ways of connecting two computers on IPX protocol on MSDOS over the internet? Some other method other than Hamachi + Dosbox native IPX? Maybe some Linux project? There's this game M.A.X. (Mechanized Assault Exploration) people have been trying to connect online for years. Help much needed =D
Do you remember which software did you guys use on DOS for the machines to communicate with each other using the IPX protocol?
@@FeelingShred The internet uses TCP/IP.
@@FeelingShred As far as I remember, you need the NE2000 driver for the network card, the IPX/ODI protocol and then something else. It is a long time ago, so my memory is vague.
My old high school ran this network and Netwars made it onto every pc in the school. Even the ones w/o hard disks people were running it off floppies. And I'm pretty sure I still have my Netwars copy from somewhere.
Can't be 100% sure, but the retro Microsoft network video was either the first video I watched from this channel, the one that made me subscribe, or maybe both things at once, a little over 2 yr ago, so this video was special, even if of only to look back and reflect upon how much I have enjoyed your content during that period. Here's to more years of tech adventures and enjoyment to come. Cheers.
Thx a lot for this cool message ! That was indeed my first video that reached a lot of people. Hope for many more like that !
@@RetroSpector78 You're welcome, I'm so glad you did get to even read this.
Oh boy! My friends and I had network parties with the coax and it was such a huge PITA getting it all to work!! They didn't make easy plug and play networking in the early to mid-90s!! We would load drivers and have to try configuring IPs and such in DOS to play DOOM. Even Windows wasn't all that network friendly! But when we got it working, let the good times role!!
Hahaha! Memory lane! I had set this network up during my study IT Admin.
Damn wish i was there to play some netwars with you :) looks fun
Man, what luxury here. Our NetWare network in 1988 had ARCnet cards (2.5 mbit), either 1mb or even 512k memory, booting off 5.25" floppies (the 512k machines showed their limitations quickly). No CDROM either, we were installing off those 5.25" floppies. I got so used to installing various operating systems off floppies.
Originally had NetWare 2.01 on a '286 server, but as soon as we moved to v2.11 the server just couldn't handle it. Had to upgrade to a much beefier 25mHz '386.
Im really impressed. Just insert the Networkscard and software. No cables, no hub, swith or router. And they can talk to each other. It's magic? 😅
We had a faster 16/4 ibm token ring network and played deathmatch Doom when it was released '94. That was awesome. No lags like you mostly have in multi player games of today.
In my high school years of 1999-2003, we ran Netware 4.11, had email via Pegasus Mail which used a dial-up modem to send and receive external mail. The 4.11 version we used was not patched with any service packs or anything and ran pretty damn stably, but couldn't see an IDE hard drive bigger than 8GB in the gold master edition. Later on I rebuilt the server a few times to move it onto more modern hardware, but by 2003 when I finished school, one could tell Novell was a dying company. Still, my high school rode the Netware horse for a few more years before they eventually got a new server and moved over to Windows Server 2003. Netware was incredibly stable, but with the rise of the internet and the fact that TCP/IP was available but overshadowed by IPX, it was a system doomed to a dead end. Still, this video brought back a lot of fun memories of me at 14/5, setting up my 1st ever server using my mentor's hand written notes. It set me down the path to become what I am today.
16:16 Always good to have as part of your marketing for your display "Low Radiation"
... wow again again with a different display @ 20:39, kuddos!
Novell Netware was such a robust NOS. I set up and maintained many systems in the day. Still have a few copies lying around.
Omg! Netwars! That takes me back to my college days!
every school used novell back in the day...memories hehe...
Netwars looks pretty impressive considering what it was: a showcase of a network's abilities for multiplayer. It almost looks like a multiplayer Elite.
Nice Olivetti in the background behind the PIII :)
Looks familiar ? :) going to get its own video soon :)
I remember we got an Olivetti 286 for free from one of my dad's friends in the late 1990s and my dad took it to the dump in about 2000 along with the monochrome CRT, because it wasn't worth anything!
War Craft II and Command and Conquer we use to have Lan Partys back in the day with. Then Quake came out and that was the thing (especially if ya had a 3dfx card). But my fav era of lan partys was Unreal TE. I could play CTF all day.
Do you know of ways of connecting two computers on IPX protocol on MSDOS over the internet? Some other method other than Hamachi + Dosbox native IPX? Maybe some Linux project? There's this game M.A.X. (Mechanized Assault Exploration) people have been trying to connect online for years. It's a mix of Command&Conquer and 4X games like Civ 2, Master of Magic (base building)
@@FeelingShred Hmm.. When we did War Craft II we used a Null Modem. Then in the game its about what Com you select. But i think its like 9600 fastest ? Maybe slower. I do not know of a program for Dos to use. Always used the games for the networking part. Never used any programs to network the computers. When Quake came out we were way beyond DOS and we used a Hub. 10base T baby ! lol. Wish I could help.
:O OMG! I loved Novel Netware!!!
I remember Novel Netware beeing common on school networks, even in the late 90’s windows 98 era. It was also used in small businesses, when I was an intern at a small local building company their small network used Novell. It was really krusty, the clients ran windows 98 and during bootup in the morning and it would crash the clients. Only after about 15 minutes the client PC that I had to do Autocad drafting on would work. I think that the server was also a windows 98 machine if my memory serves me well. It’s a long time ago, this was in 2001-2002.
good times. I remember setting up a home network to share a printer and folders. I had two wfw 3.11, three w95, two win98 and three winxp computers all networked together..
That send command got abused back in the day at uni ;)
Reminds me of the "Messenger" Windows service in the NT 5 days, in the mid/mid-ish 2000s, it was abused for porn spam. That included just hopping on the internet. IIRC, that's why XP 32-bit SP2 had it disabled by default.
For the record, first network I ever got going 100% on my own was a Netware 3.12 on a 486DX50 with a VESA HDD Controller that had 8Mb of CACHE RAM and was basically a 80286 dedicated to HDD tasks. Fast freaking thing for the day! (I was 15 or 16 hehe)
I remember seeing Novell Netware servers for the first time back in the early 1990s. I'm pretty sure I was on a YTS (Youth Training Scheme) at a defence company, and the were just getting into networking to see how, as a business, it could really help them improve productivity.
Unfortunately for me, I was on an Engineering course and only got to see the computing and IT side from a distance, but it was definitely what I was interested in rather than the Engineering.
I started on Netware 2.0 using Novell’s own 286 servers and the NDS4 disk subsystem - both of which were hugely over engineered. They were used throughout Marks & Spencers (uk retail store) in the late 80’s
The good ole days :)
It's been a while since I saw a 4.2 install! 6.5 doesn't work under Virtualbox either. Still using Netware, well OES now. Still rock solid for directory and file services.
keren sekali bro, pernah dapat belajar ini tahun 2001 saat kuliah.
What a coincidence. I just made a video about my own computer museum basement and these machines are also connected, but over coax (10baseT) and using a mishmash of protocols (NetBEUI, IPX, TCP/IP).
Netware is like a Ferrari. Comes in a red package and always needs expensive service. We tried to develop a backup backend on Novell Netware so I know how "well written" the sdk was.
Nice video .
Netwar.... nostalgic!
that takes me back - NetWare 4.x was the last version I worked with mainly installing it on Compaq ProLiant 1500 systems (Pentium 1 with Compaq Smart Array RAID controllers & SCSI hard drives) - also worked with NetWare 3.1x at lot before that and built quite a number of systems using IBM PS/2 Model 80-A31 hardware
Do you know of ways of connecting two computers on IPX protocol on MSDOS over the internet? Some other method other than Hamachi + Dosbox native IPX? Maybe some Linux project? There's this game M.A.X. (Mechanized Assault Exploration) people have been trying to connect online for years. Help needed =D
@@FeelingShred unfortunately not - not touched IPX since the late 90s so have forgotten most of what I knew about it
LOL I remember those days!!
You can use an AUI transceiver with those cards. Had a bunch of those back in the day
I made the punk rock choice of anti-MCSE and decided to go the Novell track with my network engineering degree in school which was obviously the best choice and totally not a sellout poser track in the IT Scene. Still have fond memories of useless knowledge of Novell 4.x Directories and interconnection specifics long consoled to the dustbin of history.
Yeah I hadn't yet realized the workforce doesn't care how punk rock you are. Good times though.
I remember my local school district using NetWare as a means of networking their Windows 98 Compaq DeskPro EN computers. #NostalgicTech
1:59 I never thought Hyundai made microchips. They're usually known for being in the automotive industry, though.
great
miss the old days.. Certified CNA...
Novell... dsrepair.... :) bring backs memory
way lol had 5 pc networked in a house with coax to play games, and share a dial up connection, and a 1mbps connection when cable modems were new, but we used dlink and 3com cards
i worked for ncr and i set up at&t 915 hz systems i still have the cards and pcmcia cards
Forgot to add: only doing this with full on Token Ring would've made it better. No complaints though, this was rad stuff
Thank you very much for your videos! I take this opportunity to ask you for advice. I have an old Zenith EZPC that works almost perfectly. The problem I have is that when I turn it on, the first minutes in the video I only have a horizontal line, after a few minutes the video looks correctly. I know it's a capacitor problem in the monitor. However, I would like to know if you have seen something like this before? Ronald from Costa Rica!
Had a Mid Nineties IPX lan party with DOOM (ah ! the memberberries), some mad lad figured out how to render front,left and right views (Doom) to 3 computers an early surround view.
VirtualBox recently introduced changes that break compatibility with older OSes including Windows 98 and 3.11. Maybe that is the culprit.
i remember when my male classmates used to play Deathmatch on CS or HL and make Fun of one another
i enjoyed spectating
i'd really like to play alongside frinds against AI's or even random strangers
omg last time i installed netware was in 2000 on Windows NT servers & workstation with print spoolers ..thats was a nightmare .. actually it was when the Y2K was a worry, I had to write a program what went around the company sites to test the compliance lol Y2K i kept telling the clients nothing serious would happen lol and never did ... like everything else it was all a scam to scare us! :D
would it be possible to image the netware NE2000 driver disk and upload it to archive org?
Hi! Requesting retro Netware network with Arcnet cards with star or bus topology.
Haha, some much memories came up seeing this. Had some experience with NW 3.12 and 4.x but I lost so much information. Seems I am getting old. How can you do this all now? Do you have a brain like an elephant? Seriously, I would have to prepare this for longer time to get it up running again. Thank you very much.
when you said you couldn't get netware to work on virtualbox, were you using virtualbox 5 or 6? virtualbox 6 seems to have a lot of problems and speed issues (it made my windows xp vm unbearably slow and i had to downgrade back to virtualbox 5, plus i've had various other problems caused by virtualbox 6 in the past)
Ah. university days.
hello where to download its driver
Forecast, IRQ, DMA or Memory address conflict between the sound card and the Network card....
Lucky, you must not be using your mouse on the serial port with IRQ 3 (or using a mouse at all :P )
IPX network gaming? Your experiment might prove useful, since you already have the machines connected anyway. There's this obscure DOS game called M.A.X. (Mechanized Assault Exploration) it's a mix of Command and Conquer and 4X genre like Civ 2 or Master of Magic. We have been trying to set up the game over network remotely over the years but could never succeed over IP protocol (Hamachi) Maybe you could demonstrate if the game works properly on real hardware? There's a dedicated small fanbase of the game, they even created an open source Multiplayer client of it for Windows, unfortunately it's missing the A.I. code for Co-op missions.
Anyone out there knows of tips to get IPX protocol network working on DOS over the internet these days? Maybe there are new solutions around I'm not aware of. I have only tried using Hamachi over TCP IP combined with native Dosbox IPX (it connects but it's too slow and connection drops)
Uugh, the PCs at my high school and University used Novell Netware. Netware was a pain in the but and I hated it!
This may be a Dumb Question. But is it Possible to use NetWare via Null Modem Serial Cable?
I don't think you would see the error about the CD-ROM if you had installed MSCDEX and configured it first (before the NetWare driver). I can't remember for sure. Memory is the 2nd thing to go! :) EDIT: "Oops, I see you already did that!" - Sorry! :(
3com 3c509's were our standard NIC when doing Netware/DOS clients. Netware was amazing until Windows9*; the Windows 9x Netware client was _awful_.
These were the days where being a network or sysadmin was still great ... :'/
I Dont Have time to check this video but we played games as gta1 command and conquers generals and Maybe tiberian sun 😉😂😃
It *doesn't* require MS-DOS at all. It works fine with PC-DOS and DR-DOS. DR-DOS was bundled with NetWare for a while. MS-DOS is DOS for plebs.
Do you know of ways of connecting two computers on IPX protocol on MSDOS over the internet? Some other method other than Hamachi + Dosbox native IPX? Maybe some Linux project? There's this game M.A.X. (Mechanized Assault Exploration) people have been trying to connect online for years. Any help is appreciated XD
That software you mention, would it work nowadays for testing purposes? Inside dosbox? VM? Any Linux tools? (I'm on Linux mostly)