Farewell NT4

In the summer of 1998, I bought an NT4 server for my company and installed an ethernet network. Whilst we had been computerised for many years, we worked with terminals connected to an Alpha server via a serial connection. This connection was for the ERP-like programs with which we worked at the time; office applications were virtually non-existent and certainly non-network. Thus introducing the server and the network made a huge change in our way of work.

Even though the server had only 256MB memory and a Pentium II processor, it worked beautifully (there were maybe twenty users). The server also hosted an Exchange server which too worked without problems.

The server was officially retired in the beginning of 2007 when my company and another merged. At first, the server lay idle in a corner of the server room but one day I took it home and installed it in the network of the occupational psychologist. My main interest was in the external tape drive - I hoped to use the drive in order to back up all the files - but unfortunately the drive had stopped working. 

The server worked admirably as a file server and as a database server (Firebird) until a few months ago when the first Windows 7 machines started to arrive. Win7 had difficulty reading the files on the NT4 server and even more difficulty in creating files. With regret, we installed another computer (originally Win7 but swiftly downgraded to XP) which served as a file host; the NT4 kept on working as the Firebird server.

You've heard the story about the servers which stopped working every night? When the support team came to find out what had happened, they found that the janitor had unplugged the electricity cable in order to plug in his vacuum cleaner. 

This story may be apocryphal but something similar happened this morning. The noise of the computer annoyed one of the psychologists who was sitting in the same room, so she unplugged the server!  Instant death of the databases! We tried resuscitating the server but it kept on showing 'MBR fault' - obviously the master boot record of the server had been damaged. I imagine that someone, somewhere will know how to fix this, but we need those databases up and running now. 

I've got the databases running on a temporary computer, but I will have to transfer them to the XP server. I tried this a few months ago, and whilst I was able to run the databases, I couldn't connect to them from the Win7 machines. Now I have no option but to try again.

Farewell NT4 server: you served us well for 13 years and now is the time to say goodbye.