[SunRescue] Tape drive

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Sun, May 20, 2001 at 01:55:06PM -0400, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> On Sun, 20 May 2001, Dave McGuire wrote:
> > > When I think about what's ideal in an OS, I think in terms of end user
> > > OSs.  For servers, it really doesn't matter that much as Novell (didn't
> > > they run on DOS?) and Oracle (they use raw disks instead of a file system)
> > 
> >   Novell was/is it's own operating system...an interesting but
> > somewhat nasty one at that. ;)
> 
> Now, the one Novel system I ever used, I know that I saw the thing booting
> into DOS before it went into Novell.  Maybe it was just doing something
> like loadlin (which is a dos program that boots linux), but I got the
> distinct impression that Novell was running as a 32bit dos program.  

Novell used DOS as a sort of boot loader.  Once it booted it completely
replaced all vestiges of DOS.  It had its own 32 bit OS, but without the
memory protection of Unix; thus modules written for it had to take extra
precautions to avoid stomping over other modules' memory.

Novell's weak point was that robust apps could not be written to be on top
of the OS (Oracle had a port and it was pretty low-performance), and that
the more disk you had the more RAM you needed in your box; if you added more
disk and didn't add more RAM you'd have stability problems.

Strong point was that it was pretty stable, especially compared to the DOS
and Windows boxes it had as clients.

./patrick