This developer died 14 years ago, here’s a print out of his source code

Reader scores shonky NetWare support job where he had to share monitors

This week, reader Earl tells us that just this year he responded to a Craigslist ad for a Novell NetWare Admin to figure out why .nlm files would not be loaded and fix the issue.

Earl says he wrote back and told the person that I was very expensive and I had not worked with NetWare since 2003, but if they do not find anyone else to take the job they should give me a call.

Earl was just 90 minutes away by train and got the gig.

Said server was a Dell PowerEdge 1300 with 64MB of RAM and a 10GB IDE hard drive.

I was told they ‘should’ be able to boot up but no one could remember why they had even bothered to get a ‘new’ server at all.

Earl quickly found the problem, namely an ancient surge protector more than a decade beyond its warranty.