As much as the whole ‘uptime’ wars passed with the ever increasing need for patching, this is pretty amazing.
Over on arstechnica a Novell Netware 3.12 server by the name Intel had to be finally shut down after 16 and a half years.  Apparently the bearings in the two SCSI disks had gotten so loud it sounded like a car dragging it’s muffler.
6030 days of uptime!
It’s still pretty impressive, and in some ways that was one thing Novell got right with Netware was that it was unstoppable. Â Of course their big ‘goof’ was in the application space. Â While there was a version of Oracle for Novell Netware, it was a major pain to deal with, and the GUI simplicity of Windows NT pretty much put an end to Netware.
But in some shops they don’t fix it until it’s broke. Â Even if it takes a decade and a half.
Wow. That is amazing.
Yeah.. I remember shutting down NW 312 stuff replacing it with NT, and it all had years of uptime.. then again all it did was file/print, and we demanded so much more from NT.
Seeing this on Ars a few weeks ago finally inspired me to get Netware 3.12 working in a virtual system. After much struggle, I am pleased to report success running it in VirtualBox. I never worked with netware as an administrator, although we used in when I was in college 25 years ago – must have been 2.xx back in 1989.
That sounds about right. If you feel even more crazy, in the old Watcom 10/11 CD’s is the NetWare SDK.. So you can write your own NLMs…
At one point there was a thriving community of netware devs, but then NT obliterated it. Some governments still use it though, they upgrade through the versions as it’s easier to get an upgrade PO, rather than going through the whole requisition process to get something else.
Seeing all these classic network operating systems makes me want to setup a Banyan VINES network “just for the heck of it”. Too bad there is no installation media to be found. I even have a nicely equipped EISA 486 to throw it on.
I’ve found boot floppies for the server, which is a SYSV Unix surprisingly, but yeah no install tape.
All I know about vines, is that the USMC had it all over. So I guess that speaks volumes to perceived reliability, scalability and availability if the Marines ran it.
http://wdl2.winworldpc.com/Abandonware%20Operating%20Systems/PC/Misc/Banyan%20VINES%20NOS%208.5%20%283.5%29.7z
These are the install disks, apparently.
There’s even a guide for VMWare here: http://code.google.com/p/understand/wiki/BanyanVINESOnVMwareWorkstation
thats just the boot floppies. its enough to prep the harddisk, and get it to boot, but as mentioned above, there is no tape so the rest of the OS never installs.
I discovered that after trying to install it 😉
Yeah I figured that most people just collect a file, but never really try to install it… the floppy portion works fine on Qemu 1.7 for what it’s worth…
Is there actually a tape? Maybe I have something newer/different? I have a STACK of Banyan Vines floppies, probably about 2 dozen, and there’s all sorts of labelled disks. Let me go through them, and I’ll make a list of what’s there. I also have about 4-5 of the parallel port license keys, as well. Let me drag them out of the cabinet and I’ll report back.
This is a record. A server might not have shut down for a long time like 16 year! This time period is really a record.