Menu:
This page is a quick list of some free (or shareware) DOS Applications compatible with the Novell TCP/IP Stack
In the early-mid 90s Novell sold a product called LAN Workplace for DOS which was a suite of TCP/IP programs (and a TCP/IP stack to use them with) including a Telnet client (TNVT220), FTP and TFTP clients and servers, rsh, rexec, rcp, rpr and Windows interfaces for some of these tools. LAN Workplace and the tools it provided were never made freely available - they were always commercial software with a single user license being somewhere around US$300 in the mid-90s. So the only legal way to get access to any of this stuff at this point is probably to pickup a copy on ebay.
Thankfully Novell did make the TCP/IP stack from LAN Workplace (TCP16.EXE) freely available at some point probably for the purpose of supporting NetWare/IP in the DOS VLM client. Client32 also includes a TCP/IP stack (TCPIP.NLM) out of the box. But these are just the TCP/IP stack - not exactly useful on their own.
As the Novell applications are out of bounds this page attempts to collect up a list of alternatives plus anything extra I run into. If you don't have a particular reason to use the Novell TCP/IP stack (NetWare/IP and TINY are the only ones I can think of) you may be better off configuring an appropriate packet driver shim and using something like mTCP as there seems to be very little that supports the Novell stack.
If there ever was a proper publicly available SDK for the Client32 TCP/IP stack I can find no trace of it on the internet in 2021 and the DeveloperNet CDs I have seem to make no mention of one. The LAN Workplace for DOS Developer Toolkit has survived however and while this was built for the 16bit stack (TCP16.EXE) it does work with Client32 as well. While this was never offically supported by Novell it does appear to be what Novell used for their own DOS and Windows TCP/IP utilities provided with Client32 based on the strings present in PING.EXE, WLIBSOCK.DLL, etc. Novell made it available for download and you can get a copy of it here. Documentation is included (Dynatext). It supports Microsoft C 5.1-7.0 and Borland C++ 3.0+. Source is not included and the license is almost certainly incompatible with the GPL.
Borland C++ 4.5 Note: Programs written in C work fine but references to toolkit library functions from CPP files result in linker errors. Not sure why - not very familiar with Borland C++ and even less familiar with DOS and Win16 programming.
An SDK for building client NLMs appears to exist on the Decmember 1997 issue of DeveloperNet Essentials on CD1 in the support.not directory. This SDK doesn't include any header files for the TCP/IP stack but running strings over TCPIP.NLM it looks like it may provide BSD Sockets like API alongside the Lan Workplace low-level RCB interface described in Communication White Papers section of the Communication service group in the NetWare SDK issue 15. It seems like there is proabbly enough information scattered through the LAN Workplace and NetWare SDKs to write a suitable header file for building DOS TCP/IP server NLMs that could run in the background without consuming conventional memory.
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).