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This section contains a large selection of NetWare clients, updates, documentation, screenshots and other information. Novell DOS and Personal NetWare is also included.
For discussion, there is the Novell Community Garden discord server.
I have at times run NetWare on my home network - I got a copy 4.11 from my High School (which was moving to Windows Server) the early-mid 2000s and with its wide selection of clients it turned out to be a convenient way for sharing files and logins across all of my computers. More recently (2021) I've been looking at using it again to support various vintage computers but I've been shocked at how much has disappeared from the internet since I last setup NetWare (probably around 2006-2007). So these pages aim to collect together what limited knowledge of NetWare I have along with patches and other useful things as I find them so they don't disappear entirely. Some DR-DOS stuff is included as well as it included Personal NetWare.
I occasionally maintain these pages as I find new things, try stuff out again, etc. Lately I've been taking copious screenshots as I go through setting up my virtualised netware instances and exploring everything again for the first time probably since I was in High School. Possibly sometime I'll condense these down into some sort of tutorial. Click here for old stuff from this section.
There is quite a lot over on the ftp server (here) but largely without readme files or TIDs which makes finding stuff hard. In particular there is:
Where possible each page has Patches, Documentation, notes and other related files.
At one point NetWare Server implementations derived from Novell code were available on top of UNIX and other platforms. Some of these were developed by Novell, some by other companies with Novells help. Processor Independant NetWare was part of this.
Novell officially supported clients for the following platforms at various times. Click a link to download a client. Most versions of most clients are available but in general you want the most recent version.
Third-party clients are available for a number of platforms that never received official NetWare clients (or didn't until until many years later).
Novell released plenty of client software too though much of it is of little interest today (GroupWise, PerfectOffice, etc) so not much of that is covered here.
Novell DOS 7 and the Caldera variants include Personal NetWare. Apparently you could get NetWare Lite with Novell DR-DOS 6.0 (or perhaps it was the other way round) too.
The table below shows which client operating systems are supported (in some cases unofficially) on which versions of NetWare. This may help choosing a suitable server version based on the client operating systems you want to run.
| Client\Server | 3.x | 4.x | 5.0 | 5.1 | 6.0 | 6.5 | Notes |
| DOS, 16bit Windows | • | • | • | • | • | • | Really wants IPX but Native IP is apparently possible. |
| Windows 9x | • | • | • | • | • | • | |
| Windows NT 3.1 | • | • | ? | ? | ? | ? | Depends on beta Novell client or beta Microsoft NWCS client - no production quality client exists. |
| Windows NT 3.5 | • | • | ? | ? | ? | ? | Depends on 3.5b client compatibility. May need IPX. |
| Windows NT 3.51 | • | • | ? | ? | ? | ? | Depends on 4.11b client compatibility. May need IPX. |
| Windows NT 4 | • | • | • | • | • | • | |
| Windows 2000/XP/2003 | • | • | • | • | • | • | |
| Windows Vista/7/8/10 | • | • | • | ||||
| OS/2 | • | • | •† | •† | •† | ? | probably works on 6.5 with IPX setup. |
| Mac Classic (IPX) | • | • | ? | ? | ? | ? | Probably works on 5.0+ with IPX setup. |
| Mac (AppleShare) | • | • | • | • | AppleShare over appletalk sold & licensed separately prior to 3.12, bundled with 3.12-4.2, 3rd party product in 5.x. AppleShare over IP new with and built into netware 6.x | ||
| RiscOS | • | • | •‡ | •‡ | •‡ | ? | 3rd-party client. May work on 6.5 with IPX enabled given it supports 6.0. |
| Amiga | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | 3rd-party client. Know nothing about this. |
| FreeBSD (nwfs) | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | 3rd-party client (nwfs). Know nothing about this. |
| Linux (ncpfs) | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | 3rd-party client. Know nothing about this. |
• Supported
† Needs IPX support enabled (doesn't support native IP)
‡ Needs IPX and a 3rd-party client
? Unknown
These all emulate a Netware 3.x server - no NDS or anything.
Screenshots of the NetWare administration tools
This section was getting a bit long so its moved over here.
This is the stuff I still need to do as I slowly setup my new completely overkill retrocomputing network using NetWare:
I'm not a netware expert, don't have any of those fancy novell certifications and have never administred a netware network; I've just played with it at home occasionally since 2004 or so. Email me if you've got any suggestsions or corrections for this page or any extra information you think is worth including here. My address is david at this websites domain name (without the www bit of course).