I caught a news headline late last night stating that a Novell breakup and sale is imminent. I haven’t used Novell in years, but it’s where I got my start in networking and reading that article brought back a few memories.
I was working for Best Buy in the Spring of 1995 when my buddy Jeff told me about a job opening at his place of employment. He was working on a government help desk, and the opening was for an entry level tech support analyst. Although I enjoyed working in Best Buy’s computer tech booth (the predecessor of the “Geek Squad” … except we only had two geeks!), the new job sounded fun too, and it would effective double my salary (from around $6/hour to around $12).
Prior to taking that help desk job, the only networking I had done involved connecting two machines together with a null modem cable in order to play head-to-head Doom II. Jeff taught me enough networking to get me through the interview, and in April of 1995, I started working on the help desk.
Prior to my time on the help desk, those guys were supporting an old Burroughs token-ring network. By the time I came on, Burroughs was out and the government was now running Novell 3.1. Every day I took calls regarding login scripts, drive mappings, backups, and other Novell-centric topics. I remember taking the Novell manuals we had home more than once, trying to wrap my head around it all. I even set up a couple of machines at home using Windows for Workgroups 3.11, just to learn some of the conceps.
From the Fall of 1995 through the Summer of 1996, I traveled to about a dozen different work sites performing hardware and software upgrades. Just to date this memory, back then we had set a “minimum baseline” for all workstations: a 386, with 8 megs of RAM and a 540 meg hard drive. Teams were formed, and one office at a time we criss-crossed around the country, upgrading workstations. We also upgraded all the remote Novell servers during trips, taking them from either 3.0 or 3.1 to 3.11. In roughly a year, I went from knowing nothing about Novell to knowing a whole heck of a lot about it.
The last time I worked with Novell Netware was in the spring of 1999. Our organization set a cut off date of March, 1999 to have all of our Novell servers upgraded to Novell 3.2 to prepare for Y2K (remember that?). In April (one month after the cut off), we found an office that had not even started implementing any y2k patches. So, off it was to Washington it was for me with a stack of Novell 3.2 floppies in hand to perform one last upgrade. By that time most of our servers were already running NT 3.51, and within a year I think all of our servers were running NT 4.0 and Novell was gone.
The only other Novell memory I have, and it’s a goofy one, took place at Comdex in 1997. While visiting the Novell booth at Comdex, I introduced myself and told the guys there about all the adventures I had been having upgrading Novell servers. The guys ended up giving me a red and white Novell umbrella, which I carried around and used for a while. I’ve never been much of an umbrella guy, but that one was good for starting conversations. I have no idea what happened to that thing. Like the operating system itself, it just kind of disappeared off my radar.
I cut my teeth on Novell Netware 4 and 5, Netware Directory Services… It was great stuff then. And then came Microsoft Active Directory/Windows 2000 and Netware was history. Somewhere, in my dingy home office, I have a Netware 5 study guide….
That’s my intro to networking too. Novell 3.11 3.12.
Played Doom 1 will null modem then a parallel connection. Had a very similar setup for my Novell server, 386 500 Meg drive. Learned Novell to play Doom. :)
Novell stuck around with us until 2001 as a printer protocol and then during the great XP rollout, it was retired.
The IT manager at my old school is a die-hard Novell guy, and they will probably use it til he retires. He believes it keeps us from getting viruses and problems better than running Microsoft. His time is running out!!
Have you heard the story of the phantom Netware server? The server actually got walled in, ran that way for years, and they found it when they went to do some work on that wall.
I never worked in a Netware shop but I understand the appeal. For years and years I was in charge of patching Microsoft servers, which basically meant I was a professional rebooter. I got really good at minimizing the impact of that, but I don’t think that job title even exists in Netware-land, given some of the ridiculous uptime stats you hear getting thrown around. Like 1,200 days.