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Originally posted by darthw
As I consider going to CNE 5.1 after CNA, I thought I might build a server on which to put an evaluation version of Netware 5.1 for practice. I have not found a lot of motherboard mfr. sites that tell you if Netware will or won't run on their equipment. Any ideas?

I'd like to get a newer board, with DDR, in order to use it for other OSs in time.

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Originally posted by ccieToBe


NetWare is fairly good about hardware support. Every PC that I've attempted to install NetWare on worked w/o any trouble. The main thing to worry about in setting up a new system is having enough RAM. I was able to get it to work fine on a box with 256MB and when I upgraded it to 512MB the speed increase was very noticeable. You could probably get 128MB to work but I wouldn't recommend it. Try searching Novell's website; I'm sure you'll be able to find some info on motherboard compatibility there.

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quote:

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Originally posted by darthw
As I consider going to CNE 5.1 after CNA, I thought I might build a server on which to put an evaluation version of Netware 5.1 for practice. I have not found a lot of motherboard mfr. sites that tell you if Netware will or won't run on their equipment. Any ideas?

I'd like to get a newer board, with DDR, in order to use it for other OSs in time.

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quote:

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Originally posted by dheinsdorf


Ditto. There is some freakishness getting Xfree86 Xserver (if ccie2be didnt have any trouble - thats probably cause he's inta that stuff mucho) on some video cards.

I have a Hercules Dynamite 128 AGP that will NOT run X. As in NW5, I have never seen an install that doesnt load X. Now X is not needed after the load - so it I guess nice to see that they wont let you get to a certain point in the install if X wont run.

I am running NW6 on a celeron 333 w/384meg (at a slow pc66spec). Every Dell server I have at work has an ATI Rage IIc or slightly better GPU onboard - which is a damn old GPUset. If you can score a PCI 4meg ATI Rage whatever card its a snap. Ram is sooo cheap theres hardly reason to not have your board close to maxed out.

Keep your IDE CDRom as 2ndary Master. Dunno about NW5.1 but NW5 if installing 3com ISA 509 NIC must be set to PnP (w/ 3c5x9cfg.exe) then after install set to ISA (non PnP).

Per my 5.1 AAdmin class, after install from your client goto the Management Portal at https://<server ip address>:8009 and select Server Health. All services should have a Green=OK status - if you see yellow or red, it generally indicates a resource issue, mainly lack of ram. Sometimes Portal needs tweaking - but it generally should be fine. Like if SSL isnt working alright goto http://<server ip address>:8008.

In your mobo bios, turn off any shadowing - cacheing should be on. Turn off ACPI/APM/PowerManagement. Setting PNP OS may or not have problematic effect. Set all resources to auto (IRQ's and DMA's). A serial mouse may be a problem - use PS2 and enable it in bios. If not using COMx and LPTx, disable them - frees up resources.

ATX is better than AT systems if you have it.

Go into autoexec.ncf and comment out startx.ncf unless you absolutely want to run X applets from the console (consoleOne, etc).
We dont run X on any servers. Old tech IDE drives - ATA33 4500 and 5400rpm stuff work fine till you start transferring large files - for home without serious file service its fine, in the real world it will cause mental pain. For slower boxes, if you have errors during the non gui file copy portion that you cant retry successfully, look for selecting the NetWare CDRom drivers (which is only there I believe if you use a scsi CD preloaded from MSDOS and not NetWares DRDos).

Sorry to ramble a bit, but from many installs they dont all go easy. Usually IDE is easier than SCSI. If your using a NIC or SCSI item that NetWare presents you with multiple driver choices for, my advice is a friendly call to the cards support people. If theres no support nor docs, select the first choice. Try to get an Intel or 3Com NIC (PCI). A dirty CDRom drive is a bound to be possible trouble. Cheapie KVM switch boxes are trouble. Try to keep PentiumII x86 compatible (no AMD K62's, Cyrix's or P1's).

Doug

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quote:

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Originally posted by ccieToBe


All my video cards are autodetected by XFree86 so I didn't run into any trouble there

As far as setting the CDROM to master goes; I almost always keep everything on it's own cable for performance reasons anyway so that's probably why I didn't run into that problem. That problem actually exists with a lot of OSs including some Linux variants.

My thought is even if you do want to be able to get into X when you're working on the server locally, there's no reason to leave it running, consuming resources when you're not on it. I always disable it from automatically starting and if I want to get into it run "startx".

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