email sent!

OK – got them. Looks like it has SNASIM too. Shoot me an email and I’ll get it to you. ihbda@outlook.com

That would be awesome! the Netware kit I have sadly had no snasim anything.

Hi – I got the CD’s finally. Will look this weekend for SNASIM and the versions of SAA in the kit.

It’s always fun changing countries… although I didn’t get the luxury of shipping my past unfortunately. Oh well.

I actually have a boxed & sealed copy of SNA Server for NT 3.1, I just haven’t had anything to connect to, so it kind of seemed kinda moot. Although if I had an army of AS/400’s then that’d be different, lol. There is no doubt about MS SNA Server though, version 2.11 with it’s APPC API was pretty powerful, and then version 4 with it’s ability to wrap transactions as COM objects unleashed a tidalwave of Visual Basic applications that pulled & pushed data to the Mainframe…

I guess the only thing I have more strange is Citrix 2.0… Although it’s based against a late beta of OS/2 2.0 so the 32bit binaries are totally different compared to what shipped.

I *may* have Netware SAA. I packed up and moved country a few weeks ago and the box with that stuff is in with all my goods being shipped. It’s all still at the freight forwarders. It was the package that Novell shipped out a bunch of years ago to demo their products. It had Netware 4, Netware 5 etc and a load of the add on products. When it finally arrives I’ll dig it out and look (please remind me though, as admin you should be able to see my email address?).

I remember SNASIM yes. Unsure if it’s on the distribution I mention it not being the full boxed product. I always had an AS/400 to test against. Got 4 now at home!

Never liked MS SNA though I understood it became way more capable in later versions. I installed the 1.0 version at a few LAN Manager sites. Windows NT 3.1 and SNA Server 1.0 on a 486/66 with 16Mb RAM was painful even back then!

I used to have a tape for that NetWare for VMS, but sadly I lost it long before I could get it to a drive to image it. But I’ve physically touched a TK50 tape!

Out of curiosity do you have any SAA CD’s? I’ve been looking for SNASIM which I think should be on the CD, although the one I’ve managed to find over the last 10 years didn’t have it. It’s mentioned on this page, and elsewhere, that it’ll emulate a host over DLC so you can test stuff like SAA & MS SNA.

I’ve setup Netware SAA for a travel company that used it to access SABRE. Although I kind of preferred MS SNA Server to be honest.

Novell had gateways for all of these.

I used to do site installs and troubleshooting for Netware for SAA – this gateway interfaced the Netware world with AS400’s and mainframes. Very popular at banks. The mainframe guys were very worried when I, a PFY at the time, would request they restart the VTAM!

There was Netware for NFS which would export a Netware file system to NFS clients. Then there was the Netware NFS Gateway which would do the opposite and make available an NFS export available to Netware users. These both worked great but getting the user mappings correct between the two worlds was always a nightmare.

Netware for LAT provided terminal services from DECNet hosts to Netware clients. That one was pretty simple as I recall.

Oddly, Novell didn’t have an IP/IPX gateway that would provide terminal services. We used Firefox Novix for this. This was an IP/IPX gateway and if I remember correctly, it was quite a simple affair initially. DOS based VT emulators would communicate with the gateway (over SPX probably) and then the Novix Gateway would broker the connection to pre-defined or arbitrary hosts as the administrator allowed. Version 2 I think butchered the Winsock DLL to talk to the IPX stack and thence to their gateways. The first ‘corporate’ internet connection I installed used this as a kind of firewall before I knew what firewalls were. 2 NICs in a Netware server, one had the Novix IP stack bound exclusively and the other had regular IPX/SPX. Kind of a firewall before firewalls were a thing!!

Unixware was great. I went to Novells UK HQ in Bracknell to see the early versions. 1.0 was a bit dodgy but patched up to 1.1.3 I think, it was quite solid. Installed loads and loads of Unixware up and down the UK. Loved it.

PATHWORKS was fun. That was essentially DECs implementation of SMB/NetBIOS on the VAX platform. The shop had a test MicroVAX3100 to play with. There was an interesting product called ‘Pathworks for Netware’ which was a Netware server that ran on a VAX/VMS hosts and talked IPX to the PC world.

Lots more stories from those days…. great fun!

Look at it again. It’s Novell. Like the company that made Novell Netware, and pushed IPX/SPX onto the world.

Many LANs in the late 80’s to late 90’s were IPX SPX only, hence the inclusion of IPX in NeXTSTEP, or additions for Solaris. Even early internet gateways worked over IPX/SPX.

Novell never really did ‘learn the errors of their ways’, when it came to TCP/IP, by the time they had native IP services they had given up their kernel, moved onto Linux, and basically died in a corner where the only customers left were government entities who found it easier to just keep buying from an approved vendor than go through the whole procurement process again.

What was retarded was that this was a brand new network for 1997. It should have run TCP/IP from the beginning, not IPX. Luckily they realized the error of their ways.