I received a call from a potential client a while back. It seems that their remote site was down and they were looking for someone to solve the problem. The configuration was a Novell NetWare 3.2 server, Windows NT 4.0 Workstations in the local office and 4 thin clients running across and ISDN connection from the remote office. The 4 thin clients were connecting to a Microsoft Windows NT 4 Terminal Server.
The problem was that the Terminal Server would not boot. Turns out that the equipment was installed in 2001 and the client has no software media. The cliens says that they never received any diskettes or cdroms when the system was installed. I beleive them as all of the software had been out of production for several years when their system was installed.
Remember this was 2001 and the current Microsoft products were Windows 2000 Workstation and Windows 2000 Terminal Server. Widnows NT4 had been discontinued in 1999. As for NetWare 3.2, the current version of NetWare in 2001 was NetWare 5.X. NetWare 3.2 had been dropped in the late 1990s.
The other interesting things that I found were that the battery backup had the “replace battery” light turned on and the Novell server only had a single non-redundant disk drive installed. (Oh and the client had a computer that was a year old running Windows 98 and McAfee Anti-Virus v 4.0.2 with virus definitions that were dated Nov 20, 1998).
Since we dont have a copy of the Widnows NT 4 Terminal Server software, we will be proposing a Windows 2003 Terminal Server (with media!) to solve the immediate problem. The long term solution will be to migrate the client from NetWare 3.2 to a supported Microsoft based solution with redundant disk drives and a working battery backup; current anti-virus and daily backups.
I will also propose that the ISDN WAN connection be replaced with an Internet based site-to-site VPN. The VPN would be many times faster and cost the client signficantly less than they are paying for the 64 kb/s ISDN connection that they are currently using.
