> “Sometimes I have the following problem to deal with: An OS/2 system uses NetBIOS over TCP/IP (aka TCPBEUI) and should communicate with a SMB server (likewise using TCPBEUI) on a different subnet.”
I wonder if there is literally anyone else in the world who has this problem in 2024.
Jokes aside, I appreciate the detailed work that OS/2 Museum does. From a developer’s point of view it often feels like everything is a Unix nowadays, so it’s easy to forget that the PC revolution’s mainstream came from very different commercial origins and gradually blended with the more “academic” tech like TCP/IP.
OS/2 Museum is one of the few sites that can feed my weird fascination with Netware and the old NT domain stuff, it’s great for getting an insight like you said in to the pre TCP/IP world.
Wish they had a community version I could play with, but understand they would be worried about cannibalising their already small market.
Still, for something that I have only really used in one job for a year, I'm not going to try it out further without some sort of try-before-you-buy, even if it might be interesting.
> Wish they had a community version I could play with, but understand they would be worried about cannibalising their already small market.
They may not have a choice either. IBM still owns OS/2. ArcaOS, like eComStation before it, is a licensed distribution. Their FAQ entry on refunds indicates that they have to pay IBM for their part of every license and that portion is both nonrefundable and nontransferable so if they refund a license they've lost that amount. It also presumably sets a lower bound on how little they could charge without actually losing money on every copy distributed. It would not actually surprise me to find out that their "personal edition" license is as cheap as they can consider "worth it" to offer.
IBM clearly stopped caring about growing the OS/2 market decades ago and I don't think Arca Noae really has any ambition to either. It's not like there's any realistic scenario where it suddenly becomes appealing as a target platform for anyone not already heavily invested in it outside of occasional hobbyists. The lack of any concept of users and privilege levels makes it undesirable for most desktop and server use cases that don't basically come down to "appliance" and as an appliance it's hard to see what OS/2 via ArcaOS on modern x86 offers over more popular platforms, especially with the 32 bit 4GB ceiling forever overhead. Changing those things would require substantial compatibility breaks which is not really viable when your core business is supporting environments that don't want to change their software.
I think they are not really interested in individual users, they aim at corporations having legacy applications that run on OS/2 only, so the goal is to make the system virtualization friendly and runnable on more recent hardware.
That said, my understanding (as a former OS/2 user 3 decades ago), is that a community edition cannot exist because IBM and MS still hold the copyright and intellectual property and the software cannot be distributed for free.
I recently (well, 2 years ago now? Recent relative to os/2 I guess) installed warp on an omnibook 800ct. You can get the warp disks off of the os2 museum...
Actually, I installed it onto a virtualbox guest of an old mac that was using an old compact flash card on a usb -> ide adapter, and then I moved that to the computer...
Anyhow, it all "worked" ; I even got some old games working on it. Blast from the past...
Probably. I run all the old, insecure machines on their own subnet and physical segment, and some of the "keep them going" services are hosted on VMs running on our modern VM hosts. We've got a few things that have to cross the router/firewall between the two networks, not SMB currently though.
Based on documentation, ArcaNoae comes with support for large hard drives, newer video chips, USB etc etc.. I guess it should run on most hypervisor(s) or virtualization systems, provided you use a humble hardware configuration (e.g. no need to use GBs or RAM) even VirtualBox or KVM most likely will work. But whether it's supported by the hypervisor vendor or not is a different story.
Plain OS/2 did not receive any update for 20+ years, it's installer won't work on modern hardware/virtualization systems.
I remember we thought it was straight up wizardry when we could get two OS/2 Lan Server servers to communicate over a network that we didn't control via Netbios over TCP/IP. It was like the dawn of a new age!
I had a buddy who worked in customer service for an earlY ISP, and his co-workers were shocked that he could print to the Windows NT print server at work from the dial up internet connection he used at home.
Broadcast name resolution couldn't work over his dial up internet connection, but you could still manually set up an LMHosts file on his home Win95 box.
I wonder if there is literally anyone else in the world who has this problem in 2024.
Jokes aside, I appreciate the detailed work that OS/2 Museum does. From a developer’s point of view it often feels like everything is a Unix nowadays, so it’s easy to forget that the PC revolution’s mainstream came from very different commercial origins and gradually blended with the more “academic” tech like TCP/IP.