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.

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. 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.

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.

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.