Sysadmins struggle with legacy OS/2 Warp 3 systems
10 posts across 2 communities in the last 60 days; 80% from r/sysadmin.
“One of the benefits with working in a high security environment is that any unsupported software can't be on the network. It has to be airgapped, which severely limit their usability and is thus often addressed before that. So even a six digit number of machines across the…”
“There was a 2-3 year window when "just run as administrator" was slightly excusable, when DOS/Windows apps went from an environment without security to one with security and it took a minute to fix things. It is not language that anyone should have in their vocabulary for the…”
“I have 2, one is a homegrown system that is 10,000 lines of Visual Basic code running inside of Access 97. Every machine that needs this app needs Office 97 installed. The second is our main ERP, that's inventory, billing, orders, receiving, everything. The software is from…”
Several sysadmins are encountering and discussing outdated operating systems, specifically OS/2 Warp 3 and MS-DOS 5.0, in production environments. This presents challenges related to compatibility, security protocols like NLA, and general maintenance of older infrastructure.
SOURCES (12)
“There was a 2-3 year window when "just run as administrator" was slightly excusable, when DOS/Windows apps went from an environment without security to one with security and it took a minute to fix things. It is not language that anyone should have in their…”
“I have 2, one is a homegrown system that is 10,000 lines of Visual Basic code running inside of Access 97. Every machine that needs this app needs Office 97 installed. The second is our main ERP, that's inventory, billing, orders, receiving, everything. The software is from 2004. We have it virtualized now, so I have great Veeam backups of it plus I sync it to another host so it's pretty well protected, but geez, time to pick a new one management, or time to pay for the newest version.”
“Original IBM PC XT running MS-DOS 6.22. It controls a huge 2 story tank that cooks batches of spaghetti sauce. Works perfectly, never ruins a batch. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. We have two big cabinets that originally had 16 complete spare systems with software loaded and of course we have a disk image, install floppy images and source code saved on our corporate servers. There are still 13 left in the cabinet. Once a year I clean out the fans of the working system, fire up all of t”
“IBM i urban myths ... probably had a basis of truth. The one about Microsoft running its personnel systems on AS/400 certainly did, though how long ago that stopped I never heard.”
“I run 2 old Juki pick and place machines. They run DOS 6.22 on a 486 I think. My biggest pain points are, 1) booting them up without errors, and 2) transferring files to them wirelessly without any floppies. (without installing any DOS software)Closest I got was with a GOTEK and an ESP32 emulating a USB. But it was flaky so I dropped it for now.”
“Do you currently work with or know anyone who is still using:* dBase/Clipper/CLARION/Paradox/other DOS RAD environments on period hardware to run business processes?* CNC mills/spectrometers/microscopes/other industrial instruments controlled by ISA cards (either bespoke or standards like GPIB)?* Anything with a parallel port dongle?If so, I'd be very interested in hearing your experience here, or feel free to send me an email at the address in my profile. I'm not trying to sell anything, just d”
“Many old systems run on outdated code platforms I just want to get an idea of such systems submitted by /u/Every_Entry_6379 [link] [comments]”
“Most was learned by doing. A lot of it isn't as useful as it used to be as I use more orchestration tools in modern IT. Back then I had build my own tools, so had to know the nitty gritty details of the commands to make them work across a few hundred or more systems without intervention. It also makes a big difference to have started working with linux shortly after it was released. I regularly had to compile features into the kernel. It also made a difference working on HPUX, AIX, and Solar”
“Definitely agree with that. A previous employer of mine continued to maintain a few Sun SPARC (Solaris) workstations to support legacy projects - they had an essentially legal requirement to maintain the environment used to produce any product still in service, in case a change was needed. With two SPARC workstations from the pre-Oracle days, we could easily have 20 users logged in via ssh + x windows, running GUI word processing and software dev on the SPARC machines, with each Solaris program”
“NT4 will always have a place in my heart. I started getting MS Certs on 4.0. One of my first IT jobs was to convert a NetWare 5 network over to NT over a weekend. I had a dual-CPU mobo with dual P2s on it and a 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 and a Montigo Bay sound card that I made it play games on NT.4 I hated losing a CPU to Windows 95. At work, we had a giant vertical conveyor belt/bucket system that held thousands of parts for our industry. It ran on NT. The backups were on optical WORM disks (giant mini”
“One of the benefits with working in a high security environment is that any unsupported software can't be on the network. It has to be airgapped, which severely limit their usability and is thus often addressed before that. So even a six digit number of machines across the entire company, ~700 under my personal responsibility, it's almost all up to date. It's kind of nice not letting it ever regress passed that and getting the resources to maintain that.”