So, it's been about a year since I last tried to experiment with archaic protocols, and thanks to VirtualBox's recent update to 4.3.x, which included major fixes for NetWare support, I can boot and run NW 3.12, NW 4.2, and MS-DOS 7.10 images in VBox again instead of messing about with Qemu. So I've pretty much given up on SPXII traffic generation, because I can't find anything that actually uses this protocol, so now I am moving on to trying to configure this IPX/IP Gateway product to play with that (for kicks and giggles, mostly).
I am not having a lot of luck with doing this on NW 4, so I thought about trying NW 5.1. Then I remembered why I didn't like installing NW releases after 4.x -- the accursed Java installer. According to this document on Novell's site, there was to be an option to install NW5 in a Non-GUI fashion:
Non-GUI Installations NetWare 5 also supports an all-text-based installation process. The tool to do this will be made available on the Novell website within a few weeks of 5's shipdate. The current Installation Wizard does not support a text-only option. (Although this option did exist in earlier Beta versions of the software.)
However, I cannot, for the life of me, find anything else about this option. The Java installer is extremely, extremely frustrating, to say the least. It seems like if I change ONE property during the initial text-mode installer (such as turning on tagged queuing support in the SCSI driver, or setting my own ServerID value) or such, then the Java installer crashes with a page fault processor exception (error -5). I've got my VM setup with 1 processor and 2GB of RAM, and 1 4GB traditional SYS volume, emulating a BusLogic SCSI adapter (BLMM3.HAM) and an AMD PCNet III NIC (tried PCNTNW.LAN and CNEAMD.LAN). I am not sure what is causing the JVM.NLM crash, but if it is at all possible to use some kind of text-mode installer this would make my experiments go much smoother.
Does anyone know if this capability was ever published to the Novell site in some form, and if so, what the keywords are needed to find it? Do I need to give up on NW5.1 and try either NW5.0 or NW6.0? I had a working NW6.5 install at one point, but it got b0rked up badly with some VBox experiments, and LDAP never starts up. I'll have to re-install that at some point. I was hoping to try this IPX/IP experiment using something more....lightweight. I did pickup an Intranetware CD set on eBay so I can attempt the NW4.2 image using NIAS4 if NW5.x proves to be futile.
FYI, I am booting off of the NW51SP7 English-German overlay CD. Is there an SP8 variant some place or is there other install media I should attempt?
I am not having a lot of luck with doing this on NW 4, so I thought about trying NW 5.1. Then I remembered why I didn't like installing NW releases after 4.x -- the accursed Java installer. According to this document on Novell's site, there was to be an option to install NW5 in a Non-GUI fashion:
Quote:
Non-GUI Installations NetWare 5 also supports an all-text-based installation process. The tool to do this will be made available on the Novell website within a few weeks of 5's shipdate. The current Installation Wizard does not support a text-only option. (Although this option did exist in earlier Beta versions of the software.)
Does anyone know if this capability was ever published to the Novell site in some form, and if so, what the keywords are needed to find it? Do I need to give up on NW5.1 and try either NW5.0 or NW6.0? I had a working NW6.5 install at one point, but it got b0rked up badly with some VBox experiments, and LDAP never starts up. I'll have to re-install that at some point. I was hoping to try this IPX/IP experiment using something more....lightweight. I did pickup an Intranetware CD set on eBay so I can attempt the NW4.2 image using NIAS4 if NW5.x proves to be futile.
FYI, I am booting off of the NW51SP7 English-German overlay CD. Is there an SP8 variant some place or is there other install media I should attempt?