For this install I’m going to use the lanman client that comes on the NT 3.51 server CD. I believe they included this thing in version 3.1 through version 4.0 of Windows NT. You can find it in the “CLIENTS\LANMAN.OS2\DISKS” directory. Also I bet you never realized there is a copy of Windows 95 on the 4.0 server disk, and there is a copy of Windows for Workgroups on the 3.x disks…. (CD ONLY!).

Anyways with the disk in hand (or in virtual image) go ahead and kick off the install on diskette 1.

The program does black & white on 2.0 while on 1.3 it is in colour..

Copy from the A drive to the C drive… no issues here.

While the client does have a number of lan drivers, it does not have the NIC driver that Virtual PC emulates. Luckily I’ve put it on another diskette…

And there we go, the Digital Semiconductor 2104x/2114x 10/100 mbps Ethernet driver.

And now we get to select protocols. While TCP/IP is an option, the IP stack included in this version is really only good for connection to Windows NT servers. It cannot be used by other applications. Sadly there never was a ‘winsock’ type common library for IP stack providers in OS/2.

Review the bindings. It’s a shame IBM made this process to damned involved with LAPS.

Here you can type in whatever you want.

Save the configuration.

Ok everything is good, now for a reboot!

And just to show you upon rebooting, the OS/2 VM now opens up a command prompt and starts the login process. And it’s validated my Administrator account against the NT Server in question. Now all I have to do is map the M: drive to the mailstore, and install the client.

So with everything mapped we go to install on OS/2 and… It says no. Which I guess isn’t that surpising, as the WLO help programs have a habit of crashing on OS/2. But no matter if you install it on 1.3 you can simply xcopy the installed directory and bring it online.

And there you go!

Even better it can send and receive files.

I would imagine the next ‘exciting’ steps to take down this old path is adding users into the system, and getting it connected to the world. But I’m busy with my new Itanium at the moment so it’ll have to wait for a bit.

If anyone has any feedback let me know… I know this may seem incredibly complicated, but really it’s a boat load easier then dealing with AD & Exchange 2010. Not to mention the filesizes are insanely smaller.