That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.

First published: 11^th March 2011

As a proponent of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of engineering, I sometime realise I'm using technology not just after its "sell-by" date, "Extended Support" date or "retire" date, but beyond the point when its developer has buried it beneath the crossroads with a stake through its heart, or even when the developer has been buried beneath the stock market with a bankruptcy through its balance sheet. Here I will describe some of the more notable examples.

You were expecting something else? Perhaps something to do with Things That Men Were Not Meant To Know? It's not, sorry.

In reality, this page is a geek boast, a combination of, "I was doing that before you found out what rm -r / does" and "grovel at my feet, you unworthies who know not how to route streaming video across a damp piece of string". Sad, isn't it?

Updated: 26^th June 2010

MS-DOS 6.2, 386SX33

MS-DOS 6.2 was released in 1993, I stopped using it 26th June 2010. I was using it on an Intel 386SX33 that was, for quite a few years, my main internet router. I was using quite a nice little routing program called iproute, which depended on Crynwr packet drivers for DOS.

It might sound a little risky to rely on this for the connection to the world, but it was very stable (at least, it was once I'd replaced the old 286 PC). What about speed, it could only use 10Mbps ethernet adapters? Well, when first used, the connection was a 19200bps modem. Later, that was replaced by a 256kbps leased line, then 6Mbps ADSL. The router was able to keep up with the line speed.

The system was retired when I needed to handle two external lines (6Mbps and 10Mbps), a more complicated internal network and a VPN endpoint. The replacement system runs Linux.

Updated: 23^rd November 2009

Netware 5.0

Netware was the core of the network I administered from 1993 to 2009, initially that was Netware 2.2, later 3.12, and, finally, 5.0. During that time, the disc went from 80MB to a 18GB RAID 5 array.

Netware was always ahead of Windows when it came to user and access control management, and NDS for NT made the management of Windows workstations convenient. Unfortunately, Windows upgrades caused problems for NDS for NT, and Novell abandoned the product.

Netware 5.0 continued to perform reliably, with time between reboots approaching 2 years, but a replacement would eventually be needed. Novell had already moved NDS to SuSE Linux but Novell was clearly in decline. I decided to keep control and move to Samba on Debian. The final impetus was provided by another disc failure in the RAID array, and the price of replacement SCSI discs. Software RAID 1 on Linux using cheap SATA drives seemed the way forwards.

The access control strategy under Netware was primarily by inheritance. Under Samba/Linux, access control is a combination of Linux and Windows file permissions. There are also POSIX ACLs, not enabled by default in Debian.