[gerdesj]

Good grief - NetWare with only IPX! Presumably you'll be installing their Y2K patches any day soon 8)

I'm pretty sure NetWare can natively tunnel IPX/SPX over TCP/IP, assuming you are not stuck on 3.12. I don't think you have to fork out for the multi protocol router thing. They will crash regularly until you get the magic combination spot on and then run forever.

A NW 6.5 box will run quite happily as a pretty tiny VM - you could scatter them around as routers to support whatever nightmare of an app you need to run over IPX. Tunnel them over IPSEC or whatever floats your boat.

[systems_glitch]

That particular client is stuck on NetWare 5.1 and due to how bad their maintenance has been I dare not touch the running instances. Virtualization didn't work out as there's some issue with the current patchlevel that dies on Intel CPUs greater than Pentium 4 (including hyperthreading P4s). It's...a stupid story.

[gerdesj]

On VMware you can hide CPU features - ie backrev the CPU and I'm sure HV can do the same, and no doubt KVM/QEMMU too.

I used to run a lot of NW back in the day. I remember deploying a NW 5 cluster of three Compaq boxes with six NICs each (for each VLAN) to do just DHCP/Dynamic DNS! I also ran up four HP boxes a year later with single ATM cards in them with a lot of VLANs to replace a load of 4.11 jobbies. The autoexec.ncf was a masterpiece! The cluster hosts had 6GB RAM each and despite being 32bit had quite a lot of cache which nss absolutely loved. I can't remember when NW 32 bit managed to devote >4Gb to cache but it was handy. As a file server it was absolutely unmatched. Apply an ACL and it simply worked - none of that marking subfolders and files thing that MS and Unix need. NDS/eDir was streets ahead of that weird LDAP n Kerberos thingie that MS "invented" and frankly still is.

I would suggest that you virty them as a matter of urgency. Presumably you have limited and dwindling hardware resources available and at some point something will go pop that can't be fixed. Once you have them as VMs then you can snapshot and all the other lovely things that virty brings to the game and you will never run out of hardware!

[systems_glitch]

Pretty cool to hear about big NW installs! Thanks for sharing!

We're actively working on moving that customer off Netware entirely. The main reason they can't get away from it is they're running a custom god program that manages the entire business, and it's tied in pretty tightly with their old configuration. The whole thing is in Delphi 7.

W.R.T. old hardware, they are actually some of the newer old boxes we support! My main line of business is keeping old industrial control systems online and reliable. On the PC side, the oldest stuff we have in 24/7 operation is 286-based. Pre-PC, we have a few customers running CNC stuff on PDP-11s. I don't know if we still have any PDP-8 customers, I think most of them closed up shop during the pandemic.

[gerdesj]

Good skills.

You beat our DOS 5 booting control system into a cocked hat, that a customer is running. You've got to love cough technical debt. Why on earth is "Enterprise gone awry" considered the right way to go for your IT strategy over that boring old open source bollocks that has a nasty habit of still being supported or at least working decades later? To be fair, open source wasn't a thing in the 80s for most people (nor the 90s ... ).

PDP-11s are my uncle's era and I'm 53! My first real PC was a 80286 (don't forget the 80) I bought a '287 maths co pro for about £115 so I could run a dodgy copy of AutoCAD on it. I do still have my old Commodore 64 which now has a USB interface. I assembled a ZX80 or two ...

Delphi is "just" Pascal - port it!

[systems_glitch]

The bad part is mostly the DB and the Netware integration, but mostly the DB. It's Borland Paradox.