* NetWare is where on DOS?
Last week’s newsletter about the urban legend that NetWare runs as an application on DOS brought forth some interesting responses.
A number of knowledgeable old-timers simply couldn’t believe that people still thought NetWare ran “on top of” DOS. As further evidence, I quote from one response I got, but I won’t mention the writer’s name (who evidently has been around NetWare for quite some time) to spare him embarrassment at the next Users Group meeting:
“…with NW3.x and 4.x, I believe that the DOS kernel and DOS device drivers were still running in low memory (below 640K) after SERVER.EXE was loaded. This allowed you to load device drivers and NLMs from the C: DOS partition, edit and save files on the C: partition, etc. NetWare was managing all access to the hardware, but DOS was still loaded in RAM. You had to use the REMOVE DOS or SECURE SERVER commands to actually remove DOS from RAM and disable access to the C: drive.”
Actually, the command is “SECURE CONSOLE,” but that’s a quibble. It wouldn’t be the first time that Novell has changed the syntax (or effect) of a command.
When NetWare loads, as we said last week, it removes DOS and replaces it. So why would you need the “Remove DOS” command as well? NetWare maintains a copy of command.com in memory so that it can access the DOS partition from the server console. It’s not “running on DOS,” simply using a DOS shell program to access a DOS formatted disk drive. When you DOWN and EXIT a server, you are also invoking command.com to re-load the boot-up operating system. That’s why, if you issue the REMOVE DOS command, you’ll need to do a hard boot to start up the server again.
SECURE CONSOLE does the same as REMOVE DOS, but it also restricts anyone at the console from changing the search path to load NLMs.
It can all be very confusing, and most training courses – even the Master CNE courses – gloss over these facts. Of course, with the big changes ahead for NetWare, maybe we’ll all have to learn the ins and outs of a new “REMOVE LINUX” command.
We also talked about file and folder trustee rights and where they are located, and I need to apologize to all my Macintosh friends. It was Apple on the Mac that first introduced the term “folder” for a file system directory not Microsoft. Mea Culpa! How they’re stored and the problems that can cause are something we’ll take a closer look at in the next issue.
