IBM Server 500

----- Original Message ----- From: "PC Automation" <pcautomation(a)mindspring.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Monday, February 18, 2002 3:53 PM Subject: IBM Server 500 holds Hmm, nice catch. Very nice for a home file server. I have a P100 based 4.11 server at home but 3.12 is fine as long as it has it's Y2K patches (heck even without, it's no problem). 3.12 is officially past 'end of life' now, I still have all the patches for it though. (We have an old 3.12 server out at the Air Force Cadet HQ). FWIW, a netware server is the ideal thing if you want to run diskless dos/win3x boxen, great for troubleshooting etc too, since you don't need a working hd or boot floppy to get a machine booted up, just a card with a boot rom and the right boot image on the server. Nice for playing networked multiplayer Doom 95 (my kids love that), Dune 2000, Command and Conquer or a host of other stuff that likes IPX networks. Advantage: You can have a machine with Win98 or whatever on it, plus a bootable card. At startup, the card bios will cause it to ask "Boot from Network? y/n?" if you say no, it boots off the hard disk as normal, and windoze can use the card. If you say yes, it boots dos from the server. Nice clean environment ideal for the games I mentioned without stuffing around with boot configurations. When you get it going, have a look in Volume SYS: in the LOGIN directory for a file called net$dos.sys, that's the default name for a bootable image. It's probably not got the drives on a RAID from that era, but if it is, that's even better. Your biggest problem may be logging in to the SUPERVISOR account. SUPERVISOR is Novell 3.x speak for ROOT (Unix) or SYSTEM (VMS) accounts. I've never had to break in to a Novell 3.x box, but sure to be a way if you have console access. If you decide to persist with it, I'll dig around and find out how. It could well be just the fuse, have someone check the supply. Failing that, I doubt a replacement supply would be real dear. As a server, this is still a very nice machine for a small network, mainboard would probably take up to a P100, or P120. 64Mb is quite a bit of ram for a NW3.x box, even adequate for a 4.11 system, with 10Gb or so of volume space. the knowledge to it's Have someone knowledgeable fix it. Or replace the PSU. This is a nice machine, too good to part out. Cheers Geoff in Oz.