Network Issues

Some Netware 3.12 Fileservers will not maintain date or time after shutdown

A considerable number of Netware 3.12 fileservers now fail to retain the date and time after a fileserver shutdown. This seems to have happened since 1/1/2000.

Upon restarting after a shutdown with power off, Netware will report 'Date and time are not set'

The BIOS of the fileserver passes all the Y2K compliance tests and Netware 3.12 has been fully patched.

The workaround is to forcibly set the date and time after each restart. The fileserver should by powered by an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) to ensure that a blackout does not reset the date and time.

Changing the time on a NetWare Fileserver

At the start and end of daylight saving, Netware 3.12 fileservers need to have the time changed manually. Later versions of Novell NetWare will do this automatically. However in 2000, daylight saving starts early (courtesy of the Olympic Games and the needs of American television viewers) so you will need to manually change the time on your NetWare 4 for this year only.

  1. At the fileserver console screen, press Alt-Escape until the console screen is displayed. It will be black and white and have the fileserver name at the bottom, e.g. SERVER:
  2. Change the time by typing: SET TIME 13:12 (or whatever the current time actually is)
  3. If you need to change the date as well use: SET TIME 27 March 2000 13:12

Migrating Netware Servers and Windows 95 long filenames

When migrating a NetWare 3.12 server onto a new Netware 4.11 server using the NetWare MIGRATE program it would periodically declare that it was changing the DOS name of a file. The change was made to the DOS portion of files with Windows long filenames. ALPHABE0 was changed to ALPHABET. The problem that followed this change was that sometimes this made a filename that then clashed with the name of a file that MIGRATE subsequently attempted to copy. Because of the existing filename, the other file was not copied and a whole heap of files were discarded in the migration.

The reason is that Netware v4.x and 5 encode long filenames differently in DOS mode than does Windows 9x. In the previous example, ALPHABET would encode to ALPHAB~0 in Windows 9x (depending how Windows is set to operate) while NetWare always spells it in full as ALPHABET.

Novell's document 2922642 - Long Filenames on NetWare 4.11 and Windows 95 expands on the issue. It apparently causes a problem for Word 6 and mapped root drives. The workaround is to load a patching NLM onto the NetWare 4.11 server named MIXMODFX.NLM that is contained in the file MIXMOD6.EXE. THis makes Netware handle the long filenames in the same way as Windows 95.