The office network of The German Leather Federation (VDL)

In 1991 the manager of the German Leather Federation asked me for support. They were looking for an application that could handle their address management. So I found them an application, that would do the job. They were running two PC-AT boxes under Win 3.11 and a 386 based Novell Netware 2.x server.

A few years later, I was asked to upgrade their network to operate under Novell Netware 3.12.

In 1999 they asked me to analyse what would be necessary to get their installation (which in the meantime changed to two 486 boxes still on Win 3.11 and two Pentium driven workstations running Win95 and a Pentium 133 with 32MB RAM acting as Novell server) safe for the year 2000. I realised that it would take a lot of time to update to any working version of Novell Netware 3.12 (no patches were ever installed on the system).

They were thinking about using Windows-NT server, but they did not have money to buy a new server and no funds to upgrade to a newer version of Novell Netware. I suggested to use LINUX as the operating system and run Samba on top of it. This would have the side effect to eliminate one of the two existing ISDN connections from the Pentium workstations and connect the other two to the Internet as well. Besides the file server services, the LINUX box acts as central mail exchange, web proxy and has a central dial on demand access to the Internet.

I got the job to do this modifcation. I also suggested to upgrade the two 486 based workstations to Pentium PCs in order to get a common Win95 platform for the workstations. All this could be done in a relatively short time. The only problem occured with the address management software. It did not work correctly under Samba, but only when accessed from a Win95 client. If the same client software ran on a WinNT box, everything was ok. So I upgraded from SuSE Linux 6.1 to the new 6.2 release with no luck. The problem did not go away. Using a packet sniffer I found out, that the Win95 clients use a different method to scan directories. Since the server used to be Novell, I installed mars_nwe (MARtin Stover NetWare Emulator) and now have a Windows and Novell server emulation running on the Linux box. This cured the problem.

The next project is to get their Internet dial-up line from a 64K ISDN to 768K ADSL line. This should be no problem. The required software (PPPoE) is part of the SuSE Linux 7.0 Edition which I just installed. Now we are waiting for German Telekom to install the hardware.

In the meantime, the ADSL line is up and running since September 2000. Whenever problems where noticed, they were related to the Telekom-peer. I am very pleased with the machine, the operating system and the software running on it. Here's a snapshot of the procinfo output I made on November 5 2001. 

Bootup: Mon Mar 26 15:03:20 2001    Load average: 0.01 0.05 0.01 1/52 26154

user  :      12:48:45.51   0.2%  page in : 12295912  disk 1:  4418857r 4008386w
nice  :       1:17:40.95   0.0%  page out: 11347046
system:       9:07:07.71   0.2%  swap in :   100906
idle  : 223d  1:59:02.02  99.6%  swap out:     9268  disk 4:    11517r 40473w
uptime: 224d  1:12:36.17         context :138374716

irq  0:1935795619 timer                 irq  9:   2944143 eth0
irq  1:       729 keyboard              irq 10:  20957233 eth1
irq  2:         0 cascade [4]           irq 11:   8365631 aic7xxx
irq  6:         3                       irq 12:   2952539 HiSax
irq  7:   1105008                       irq 13:         1 fpu
irq  8:         5 rtc                   irq 15:    789047 ide1
As you can see, the system (a Pentium running at 133MHz with 32MB RAM) is almost idle all the time. Still it acts as a file, print, mail and web server for 4 workstations, as well as proxy to the world wide web.

If you want to get more information about the German Leather Federation, please visit their web-site. N.B.: I don't manage their web stuff.