Search Networking reports that Novell have finally announced the cessation of legacy installs of NetWare on physical machines ceases at the end of March 2010. It seems now that the only remaining way of getting support for NetWare is as part of a migration project to OES2.
As a backup consultant, my history with NetWare is a spotted one. Particularly within NetWorker, it’s always been at best a real pain in the neck to backup. Sure, you could eventually get it to work, but there’s been gaps in support (particularly the jump from client 4.2 to 7.2) and debugging backup problems on NetWare has never been an enjoyable problem. On the other hand, once you got it working it just kept on working and working and working and working and … well, you get the picture.
While operating systems (or operating environments) came and went with considerable regularity in the early days of computing, it’s not often these days that we say goodbye to an operating system entirely. I’m actually struggling to think of the last unique operating system (as opposed to clone/distribution) that went. It may have even been BeOS.
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