A lifetime ago I worked for an emulation company (Micro-Integration / Bluelynx) that developed a "twinax gateway" where the 5250 emulation client software ran over IPX. This was also licensed to Novell who sold it under their brandname. There were competitors (Idea and AST).
Basically, you could put up to 6 twinax cards in a PC, connect those to the twinax ports on the midrange (36, 38 or AS400) and anyone on the network could run 5250 emulation DOS over IPX natively.
I have not uttered Novell Netware, IPX/SPX, Netware for SAA (vaguely recall) or many of the other terms below for over 25 years. Have you travelled back in time?
😊
Greg
-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Patrik Schindler
Sent: Monday, April 3, 2023 6:27 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] DOS 5250 emulators with IPX transport
Hello,
I've (again) seen jobs in WRKACTJOB on my model 150 running V4R5, named QTVIPXTELN. Those are running while IPX is active. (The old proprietary protocol being used by Novell Netware.) Some searches and guesswork make me think: These are telnet servers for IPX, just akin QTVTELNET being the TCP/IP telnet server.
Now I wonder: Has there been a (DOS) client for exploiting this capability? As far as I've learned, running Client Access for DOS with a Token Ring Adapter alongside with the Netware IPX client stack isn't possible. Each of that software assumes to have exclusive control over the adapter. Typical DOS stuff. :-)
The documentation (SC41-5400-00, Internetwork Packet Exchange Support v4) provides no further enlightenment. The manual mainly focuses on the interoperability with AnyNet. Appendix F mentions a "Netware for SAA Product Offering", the only place in the PDF where the string 5250 is to be found.
I've read extensively about Netware for SAA previously and it's not clear what exactly the benefits are in terms of the AS/400 platform. From my understanding, OS/400 V4 supporting IPX and telnet over IPX seems to be enough to serve sessions to a 5250 DOS client using the Netware IPX stack. No need for Netware for SAA.
Does someone remember which DOS clients (not Windows, please) have been available to support IPX transport, if any?
Thanks!
:wq! PoC
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