I sent you an email!.. the old fashioned way

I never tried it under libvirt, it seemed to take away the control I had running it from command line. My configuration reflects the real hardware Netware ran on the time and it is very picky about this.
NW4-IDLE.NLM was part of a VMware Tools package, if you search, you should find it. Put it on a virtual floppy then either run the installer or just copy it across manually and load it from autoexec.ncf. You might also want to look for DOSidle which will do the same for MSDOS/DRDOS VMs before you LOAD SERVER and it switches into protected mode.
I’ve run it with real and virtual clients, real across a tap interface and virtual using udp tunnels.

I’ll run mine up again over the next few days, it might just refresh my memory!

Yeah, that looks pretty similar to how I was running it directly and it did seem to work fine though I didn’t go as far as connecting any clients to it or getting it on the network. How stable has it been for you?

My hope was to have the VM managed by libvirt alongside a few other guests I’ve got running on this box so I could leave it running long-term to support other vintage systems. But for some reason it just can’t boot without crashing and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

This is the command libvirt runs:
/usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 \
-name guest=unnamed,debug-threads=on \
-S \
-object secret,id=masterKey0,format=raw,file=/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/domain-44-unnamed/master-key.aes \
-machine pc-i440fx-3.1,accel=kvm,usb=off,dump-guest-core=off \
-m 64 \
-realtime mlock=off \
-smp 1,sockets=1,cores=1,threads=1 \
-uuid ee191a6e-9a96-4845-8673-ade72081c035 \
-no-user-config \
-nodefaults \
-chardev socket,id=charmonitor,fd=29,server,nowait \
-mon chardev=charmonitor,id=monitor,mode=control \
-rtc base=utc \
-no-shutdown \
-boot strict=on \
-device piix3-usb-uhci,id=usb,bus=pci.0,addr=0x1.0x2 \
-drive file=/home/david/disk_img/netware411.qcow2,format=qcow2,if=none,id=drive-ide0-0-0 \
-device ide-hd,bus=ide.0,unit=0,drive=drive-ide0-0-0,id=ide0-0-0,bootindex=1 \
-spice port=5902,addr=127.0.0.1,disable-ticketing,seamless-migration=on \
-device cirrus-vga,id=video0,bus=pci.0,addr=0x2 \
-sandbox on,obsolete=deny,elevateprivileges=deny,spawn=deny,resourcecontrol=deny \
-msg timestamp=on

I don’t really see anything that looks like it should make netware unhappy but then I don’t have much experience with qemu. Unless -nodefaults is resulting in some setting important for netware being turned off? Ive tried getting libvirt qemu-system-i386 instead but it didn’t make any difference.

Running this same command directly without the -object, -mon, -chardev and -spice parameters seems to work fine though – it was up running monitor.nlm for an hour and a half with its Gtk UI sent to an X server on my windows PC before I decided to shut it down.

I don’t have nw4-idle.vlm – where does that come from? Finding something to make it idle nicely was the next thing on my to-do list once I got it to successfully boot under libvirt.

David,
I’m launching mine with:

qemu-system-i386 \
-enable-kvm \
-m 256 \
-M pc \
-netdev socket,id=net0,udp=127.0.0.1:40002,localaddr=127.0.0.1:40001 \
-device pcnet,netdev=net0,mac=00:00:0d:31:04:11 \
-soundhw pcspk \
-cpu pentium2 \
-monitor stdio \
-hda netware411hd.ima \
-cdrom nw42_sp9_NB.iso

(hopefully the formatting will work).
Also – do you have the NW4-IDLE.VLM loaded so your Vm CPU is not running permanently at 100% ?

Tried some more things and the results are confusing.

Running netware on my linux box under qemu directly with –enable-kvm *seems* to work fine. Running it via libvirt and virt-manager does not. It reliably crashes early in the netware startup process.

I’ve pulled out the command line parameters libvirt is supplying to qemu and had a go at running qemu how libvirt is running it. I removed a few parameters which appear to be how libvirt is controlling qemu (-object secret…, -chardev…, -mon chardev…) and netware booted successfully and I could connect to its console with a spice client. It did crash after a few minutes with a CPU Hog error though.

Running it with a local gtk interface instead of remote spice interface seemed to be fine – was up an hour and a half before I shut it down. But I can’t see why choice of qemu video output should affect netwares stability. Might be if I put some load on netware it would have crashed.

So it looks like netware 4.11 might just be a bit unreliable under KVM. And for some reason having libvirt watching qemu seems to make the problem much worse.

How are you running Netware 4.11 in KVM? Would you be able to post some notes on the config you’re using, etc?

I’ve just tried setting it up using virt-manager under debian buster (10.8, kernel 4.19.0-6-amd64) without any success.

First attempt – latest freedos. Installer won’t run – exits after language selection or I get an invalid opcode error. Guess not compatible with FreeDOS.

Second attempt was using MS-DOS 6.22. Installer worked fine but when it tried to start server.exe it just crashed (Abend: Server-4.11-4431: CPU Hog Detected by Timer, Running Process: Initialization Processs) followed eventually by another Abend (Page Fault Processor Exception).

Third attempt, MS-DOS again but under regular qemu with no KVM. Everything installs fine, server starts fine. I installed SP9. Try running it with KVM but same problem. A few times its been able to begin starting but it always gives the CPU Hog error before its able to finish and get to the command prompt.

MARS was not very easy to setup, but yes I’ve used it, and it was totally a thing.

I’ve found the NetWare emulator thing for NT/2000 is FAR easier to setup, and with NT/2000 drivers it’s WAY faster too!

super cool to hear, I’m still a 3.12 man myself, but glad that the netware flame hasn’t completely died.

there is probably literally a dozen of us!