I have been using OS/2 just about as long as anyone, starting with one of the first public betas back in late 1987. Several months ago I wrote an article [11] about OS/2's lack of integration with Windows and NetWare and got lots of mail, both pro and con. Several of you offered to take me up on my plea of coming to my own office and helping to get all three products up and running on my network. Before I describe what happened when I accepted two of the offers, you should know two things about me and OS/2: first off, I am a long-time user, having first touched OS/2 back in late 1987. While I can't claim continuous use, I have run versions 1, 2, and 3 (Warp) at one time or another. Second, I recently did some consulting to IBM on Warp Connect. You can make up your own mind about whether that puts me in their camp or not. My first victim was Michael Barnes. He is a systems integrator from Cedar Rapids, Iowa who has installed several dozen OS/2 systems along with being a Certified NetWare Engineer and a member of Iowa's Team OS/2. He was going to be on Long Island for some personal business and I agreed to have him spend a day trying to get OS/2 installed. Anyway, Barnes arrived promptly at 9 am and set about to install Warp Connect. We ran into a snag with the beta software that I had brought back from Austin and rather than try to figure things out, we installed the shipping version of Warp and the Netware OS/2 client instead. Barnes had to clean up all the files from the Connect aborted install, and he certainly knew his way around a hard disk. He then got things up and running in a few hours, once we located the Intel EtherExpress driver (these come included with the Connect product, by the way) and changed a few holdover parameters from the DOS NetWare configuration. By noon we could login to my NetWare 4.1 server. Then things started going downhill. We managed to crash the system when we tried to run my Windows applications. We kept getting errors in loading my Soundblaster Pro driver, and we found that OS/2 was using the wrong interrupt and I/O address settings. Barnes gave it a good try, though, but he never managed to get my system working with both NetWare and Windows. The Soundblaster card was his undoing, and he later admitted to me that he had never dealt with one before. About a month later, I tried again, this time with two local New Yorkers. Mark Halegua is president and sole owner of FarSight Data Systems in Queens. Halegua has been running OS/2 for 2 and a half years, and has installed it several times for other companies. Halegua is also chairman of the OS/2 special interest group for the NY PC users group. He asked if he could bring a friend of his, Andrew Fischer, who runs a large network at a downtown law firm that uses completely OS/2-based servers with mostly Windows workstations. They began by tracking down OS/2 files that were still left over from Barnes' installation. (I had switched back to running ordinary Windows between visits.) I gave these guys the option of running the beta Warp Connect software that I had from IBM , but Halegua refused. "I like to go with what I know works," Halegua said. We began the install at 10:45 am, using the Warp shipping version. Our first snag was again that Soundblaster card. I had used different settings than the defaults, and we had to go into the CONFIG.SYS and adjust them manually. "It would be nice if OS/2 would pick up the settings from your DOS CONFIG.SYS settings, but they don't," said Fischer. Next our consultants wanted to make some changes into my Windows .INI files to make sure that they didn't conflict with anything that OS/2 was doing. They took out NWPOPUP.EXE and the network connection settings in WIN.INI. We got our base OS/2 system up and running within an hour. These guys were jamming. Now time to install the NetWare client. Halegua brought his own software, and had a rather colvoluted way of installing it. First he loaded the 2.01 version of the client, and then upgraded it to the current 2.11 client (this is what will be/is shipping with Connect). Why go through all this trouble? "Mainly because this process works flawlessly," said Halegua. He has since figured out how to install with just the 2.11 client. Well, it didn't work so flawlessly. Some of the files weren't copied correctly, and Halegua spent some time fiddling with that great dumping ground of OS/2, my CONFIG.SYS file. (They took out the unneeded HPFS driver that the IBM install automatically puts there, because I wasn't using it. "It's a performance killer if you have minimal RAM and swap space," they both said.)A few other tweaks were required -- clearly these guys have done this before. So far we hadn't done anything with Windows. "I've learned to first concentrate on getting all things OS/2 up and running, and then worrying about Windows," said Fischer. We needed to adjust a few settings in the DOS-WIN-OS/2 notebook, specifically to bring up Windows in enhanced mode, provide full screen access, and change the audio adapter setting to optional from the default required setting. Those seemed to work. By the end of the day, I was up and running. I learned a few things from the experience. First, 8 megabytes of RAM for running a network client just isn't enough for Warp -- I've put 16 megs in now. Second, IBM still has room for improvement in terms of simplying the network process, although from what I have seen of Warp Connect it goes a long way towards helping. And finally, while Windows programs work, they will require some adjusting.
Click here to return to the previous
page
David Strom
Port Washington, NY 11050 USA
US TEL: 1 (516) 944-3407