1989 Networking: NetWare 386

Thanks to the recent warez mega dump, another long lost gem has come to light: NetWare 386, also known as NetWare 3.0.

Booting NetWare 3.0

In September 1989, Novell released NetWare 386 V3.0, the first in a long line of 32-bit network operating systems. At the time, Novell’s mainstay was NetWare 2.15, a system designed to run on 286-based machines.

NetWare 386, as the name suggests, required at least a 386 processor. It was a major redesign of the NetWare OS intended to take advantage of (then) high end 32-bit hardware. Whereas NetWare 2.x was linked from object modules during installation (much like commercial UNIX implementations), NetWare 386 utilized modules (NLMs, or NetWare Loadable Modules) which could be loaded and unloaded at run-time.

Disk drivers, network drivers, protocols, and all sorts of added functionality were implemented as NLMs in NetWare 386. This made NetWare 3.0 installation and maintenance far simpler compared to NetWare 2.x. The NetWare 2.x kernel had to be linked during installation (a lengthy process), and any change of a disk or network driver required the OS to be re-generated again. In NetWare 3.0, all it took was copying a new driver and changing a configuration file.

NetWare 3.0 was in some ways a limited release, although at the same time it was a fully functioning file server which could support up to 250 users (compared to the 100 user maximum of NetWare 2.x). That was reflected in the pricing—7,995ドル. NetWare 3.0 was Novell’s flagship product, even though it didn’t fully realize the NetWare 386 vision. Only the IPX protocol was supported, the set of available disk and network drivers was quite limited, and third-party NLMs were more or less nonexistent.

When NetWare 3.0 was released, the NLM development kit was not yet available. That is likely also the reason why NetWare 3.0 did not ship with CLIB.NLM, MATHLIB.NLM, and a few other NLMs. These NLMs became available a few months after the NetWare 3.0 release though, together with the development kit.

Installing NetWare 3.0 is not fundamentally different from installing later 3.x releases. The installation procedure is completely different from installing NetWare 2.x. Rather than configuring and linking the OS kernel first, it is initiated by booting the NetWare 3.0 OS, and all requisite drivers are dynamically loaded as separate modules.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, NetWare 2.x could boot directly from hard disk (using so called “cold boot loader”) but NetWare 3.x cannot. NetWare 3.x requires DOS to be loaded first, and then SERVER.EXE must be run. Unlike NetWare 2.x, it is possible to completely shut down NetWare 3.x and return back to DOS. For that reason, NetWare 3.x requires either a small bootable DOS partition or a bootable DOS floppy.

To install NetWare 3.0, one simply runs SERVER.EXE, loads the appropriate disk driver, and then loads INSTALL.NLM. While NetWare 2.x required a separate external installer, NetWare 3.0 is installed from a running NetWare system.

Installing NetWare 3.0 files

NetWare 3.0 is old enough that it didn’t ship with ODI-based client drivers and used the old monolithic shell. It’s also of course old enough that it only supports DOS 3.x and 4.0 clients. But it has no trouble talking to newer clients running ODI and PC DOS 2000, for example.

NetWare 3.0 SYSCON

Original NetWare 3.0 disks are yet to be found. It is possible that only a few thousand copies were ever sold, and since they would have been sold primarily to large corporations (given the eight thousand dollar price tag), the vast majority of the extant copies were no doubt destroyed.

And yet, thanks to software pirates of 1990, NetWare 3.0 can run again after 35 years.

This entry was posted in 386, NetWare, Networking, Novell, PC history. Bookmark the permalink.

61 Responses to 1989 Networking: NetWare 386

  1. Josh Rodd says:

    NetBEUI was on the XP CD. It just took a few extra steps to install, and the same drivers still worked on Windows 7 (32-bit). I’ve never tried it on a newer version.

  2. MiaM says:

    Josh:
    Interesting!
    A bonus question is if NetBEUI was on the 64-bit XP install media, and if so if it works on newer versions of Windows as well? πŸ™‚

  3. ender says:

    It’s not on the ISOs I have (there is VALUEADD\MSFT\NET directory, but it only contains TOOLS and not NETBEUI like on 32-bit XP).

  4. MiaM says:

    Then the question is if it’s a part of the leaked XP sources, and if it compiles as 64-bit code and if so if it works, and if so if it also works on Windows 7, 10, 11 and so on πŸ™‚

  5. vbdasc says:

    Hold your horses, man. Don’t forget that 64-bit Windows kernel drivers need to be signed by MS.

  6. zeurkous says:

    @vbadesc: “signed by MS”…? As someone once observed to me: those kind
    of shenanigans is exactly why it’s easier to get windoze 1.0 to run on
    hardware made decades later than it will likely be to get `recent’
    versions of windoze to run when *they’re* decades old.

  7. Richard Wells says:

    The requirement for signed drivers can be turned off with the boot options. Those techniques work through at least from XP-64 through Win 7-64. It would be enough to run the driver and test out just how rickety the whole operation will be.

  8. zeurkous says:

    @vbdasc: Menotices me’s spelled your name wrong even here. I’m so
    embarrassed (as me usually doesn’t make these kind of mistakes) —
    please accept me apology.

  9. vbdasc says:

    It’s okay, dude, no offense. And it’s not my (real) name, either πŸ™‚

  10. Yuhong Bao says:

    AFAIK later versions of NetWare 6.5 no longer require DOS to boot. I wonder how they managed that.

  11. Yuhong Bao says:

    Interestingly Novell and Digital Research signed the merger agreement in 1991 right when NetWare 386 was becoming common.

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