Netware 4.2 / DOS login

[Jorg]

I need some help as my memory seems to have faded too much

I'm trying to configure an XT with SMC 8013 Network card to login to a Netware 4.2 server (IPX).
My experience with Novell stopped about with Novell 3.12.

I'm able to connect to the server (LSL, SMC8000, IPXODI, NETX) with the drivers provided with the card.
and I get a message
* connected to server XXX

Now however it would be very helpful to have some drive mappings to the server volumes.

As far as my memory goes that needed some MAP.EXE util - but where do I find that?
Or do I need to configure also something server side, and how?

I seems a bit hard to find any docs online that consider these old Netware versions, most are geared to windows and >Netware 5, with TCP/IP.

 

[Stone]

I have SFT Netware 286 Level II v2.0a with all the manuals if that might be of any assistance.

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?67204-Novell-SFT-Netware-286-Level-II-v2-0a

 

[kgober]

add LASTDRIVE=Z in your CONFIG.SYS. That tells DOS to allocate space for drive letters all the way to Z. Then when you load NETX it will use the first unused drive letter in the range C-Z (iirc) to map a drive that contains just the login utility and a couple other things. After you log in, you should by default have your Z: drive mapped to SYSUBLIC (unless you changed the login script to do something else) which contains MAP.EXE and all the other NetWare user utilities.

it's been a long time, but I have a hazy recollection that NetWare would use drive letters up to and including whatever you had LASTDRIVE set to, while the Microsoft/IBM DOS LAN Requestor would use drive letters *after* LASTDRIVE. So if you needed to reserve some drive letters for use by DOS LAN Requestor you'd tell LASTDRIVE to reserve fewer.

 

[Jorg]

Thanks both of you!
I had LASTDRIVE=Z in my config.sys, because that also was something I vaguely remembered from Netware 3.12
It seems Netware 4.2 changed behaviour, because now it acts like MS/Lan requestor.
So I changed it to LASTDRIVE=E.

It seems the only utility I missed was LOGIN.EXE, which is on the server PUBLIC directory.
Although that doesn't help much when you can't access it.
I made a VM for a 32 bit Windows XP, for which you can download a Novell Client, and was able to access it, as well as generate users with NETADMIN32 (also on the PUBLIC directory).

After transferring LOGIN.EXE to the XT and logging in, it mapped drives and the server was accessible.
But not with LASTDRIVE=Z, because then it said 'all drive letters are taken locally'.
With LASTDRIVE=E it seems also to be able to access LOGIN.EXE on the server from NETX.

With the server accessible now all utilities are too.
Now my XT has access to 40 GB of disk space, yay!

 

[kgober]

I checked one of my boot floppies and it has LASTDRIVE=Z, but it also uses the VLM client rather than NETX. so maybe that's the difference, DOS LAN Requestor and NETX use drives after LASTDRIVE, while VLM uses drives before.