In 1990, Microsoft released LAN Manager (LM) 2.0, a member of a long line of Microsoft’s networking products that started with MS-NET circa 1984 and eventually morphed into Windows NT file sharing.
LAN Manager 1.0 was released in 1988 as an OEM-only product, with the largest OEM being 3Com and their 3+Open. Microsoft collaborated with 3Com1 and the two companies jointly published the NDIS specification for network drivers. However, the relationship soured in 1990 after Microsoft decided to sell shrink-wrapped LAN Manager directly and bypass OEMs.
The OS/2 Museum owns a boxed copy of Microsoft LAN Manager 2.0 from circa December 1990, but recently a pirated copy of LM 2.0 from June 1990 came to light, found right next to MS OS/2 1.21 disks. That brought an obvious and simple question: When was LAN Manager 2.0 released? The answer, is unfortunately far from simple.
Besides the warez archive, there is physical evidence that Microsoft built something at the end of June 1990 and that it was the “final” release of LAN Manager 2.0. Normally a press release would answer a lot of questions, but one for LM 2.0 has remained rather elusive so far. The closest thing we have is this press release about OS/2 1.21 from August 1990. But it happens to be highly relevant.
The press release clearly explains that LAN Manager 2.0 server requires OS/2 1.21. But that was an OEM product, and end users could not buy OS/2 1.21 from Microsoft directly. LAN Manager 2.0 was also not bundled with OS/2, unlike LM 2.1 and later releases (which came with MS OS/2 1.3 included). Even if Microsoft did have boxed LM 2.0 copies ready to go in early July 1990, they could not easily sell them because OS/2 1.21 was not available. The OEM fastest to ship OS/2 1.21 was likely Compaq, and they did so perhaps in late August or in September 1990.
Also in the press release is the following statement: “LAN Manager version 2.0 will ship during the month of August.” It is unfortunately unclear whether that was LM 2.0 directly from Microsoft or through OEMs. According to InfoWorld2, 3Com released 3+Open based on LAN Manager 2.0 at the end of September 1990. A February 1991 InfoWorld review3 of networking products says that “[v]ersion 2.0 of LAN Manager, released in August 1990, is a Microsoft shrink-wrapped product”. Perhaps Microsoft did ship LAN Manager 2.0 in August 1990 then, but so far there’s no truly solid evidence one way or another.
A supplemental readme file included with MS-DOS 5.0 states: “If the files are dated before June 1990, you have [LAN Manager] version 1.x. Files dated after June 1990 are typically version 2.0.” (The second sentence was probably meant to read “Files dated June 1990 or later”.) That suggests the LM 2.0 files dated June 1990 did make it to end users, whether through OEMs or Microsoft directly.
LAN Manager 2.0 Updates
Another, somewhat indirect source of information is Microsoft KB articles. Many of those were deleted from the KB database long ago, but can be found on old CD-ROMs. The KB articles provide valuable information about the (numerous!) updates to LM 2.0.
KB article Q66122 talks of a golden release of “LAN Manager version 2.00 packaged product”, and a CSD1. CSD means Corrective Service Diskette, and CSD1 is IBM-speak for patch level 1.
Identifying the specific LM 2.0 version is not particularly easy. LAN Manager 2.0 unfortunately does not support the NET VER command at all (that came in LM 2.1). The full-screen NET interface only shows “Version 2.0” regardless of the CSD level. Timestamps can help, but OEM releases of LAN Manager are likely to have modified timestamps not matching the Microsoft originals.
But LAN Manager 2.0 disks come with files called LANMAN.CSD which ought to identify the precise version. Rather surprisingly, this mechanism does not appear to have been documented by Microsoft.
The June 1990 version of OS/2 Workstation 3 disk has a LANMAN.CSD file dated June 28, 1990 that looks like this:
MS LANMAN2.0 FOR OS/2
CURRENT CSD LEVEL = 0
PRIOR CSD LEVEL = 0
CSD level zero implies the first release. The Microsoft-branded LAN Manager disks from late 1990 (which just say “Version 2.0” on the Setup disk without anything closer) have a LANMAN.CSD file dated November 19, 1990 with the following contents:
MS LAN Manager
Version 2.0 Component ID 000111990
Current CSD Level: LM000002
Last CSD Level: LM000001
Note that the format of the file changed. And the CSD file suggests that it’s not the first but rather second update. This is where KB article Q69738 comes to the rescue, showing the following list:
CSD 1 is LAN Manager 2.00a.
CSD 2 is LAN Manager 2.00b.
CSD 3 is LAN Manager 2.00b for MP.
CSD 4 is the first patch to LAN Manager 2.00b (patch 4).
CSD 5 is the second patch to LAN Manager 2.00b (patch 5).
So the November 1990 file actually belongs to LAN Manager 2.0b (or 2.00b)! And between June and November 1990, there was a LAN Manager 2.0a update.
The OS/2 Museum owns another set of LAN Manager disks labeled “Microsoft LAN Manager Upgrade”. The disks are rather nondescript and do not identify the version at all.
There’s a LANMAN.CSD file from May 17, 1991 with the following contents:
MS LAN Manager
Version 2.0 Component ID 000051791
Current CSD Level: LM000008
Last CSD Level: LM000007
If the SETUP.SCR file on the same disk is to be believed, the disk set is a “LM2.0C UPDATE”, otherwise known as LAN Manager 2.0c. Despite the fact that the README file on the same disk refers to LAN Manager 2.00b.
KB article Q76869 reveals that LAN Manager 2.0c added support for remote booting over Ethernet (the initial LM 2.0 supported remote boot over Token Ring only), but also mentions “LAN Manager Patch 9 disks”. If LAN Manager 2.0c was CSD8 then “Patch 9” would have been the first update to 2.0c.
KB article Q71167 describes the earlier “Patch 6 update” to LM 2.0b, which would have been the third LM 2.0b update; there was likely another update (Patch 7) before Microsoft released LAN Manager 2.0c as CSD8.
And finally KB article Q77091 mentions a bug that will be fixed in “LAN Manager 2.0c upgrade Patch 10, as well as LAN Manager version 2.1”, somewhat implying that Patch 10 may have been the last before LAN Manager 2.1 obsoleted LM 2.0. Or not, who knows.
Installation and Password Fun
Installing the initial LAN Manager 2.0 release springs a wonderful trap that Microsoft put in place back in June 1990.
As was common at the time, LM 2.0 does not create a user-specified account during installation. Instead, it comes with a predefined ADMIN account with the password “password”. But… after installation, that account just does not seem to work. Which is rather unfortunate, because if the default admin account doesn’t work, there’s no way to administer the server at all, and there’s just a lot of “access denied” error messages. The server can’t even be shut down cleanly.
Part of the problem is that LM 2.0 has a bizarre concept of account validation. Without a domain controller to validate logons (and to change a newly installed LM 2.0 server to a domain controller, one obviously needs admin privileges!), LAN Manger lets a user log on with more or less any combination of username and password, effectively working as a guest account. But when performing any actions that need specific privileges, LAN Manager checks the username and password against its local account database. So it’s possible to be “logged on” yet unable to do anything, which is confusing to say the least.
After trying all kinds of different things, I finally managed to get a useful error message when running net admin \\LM20 password :
It turned out that LAN Manager 2.0 was shipped with 90-day password expiration. The password can be changed as follows (assuming the server’s name is ‘LM20’):
net password \\LM20 admin password newpassword
Just about everyone trying to install the initial LAN Manager 2.0 release ran into this problem4. Keeping in mind the timeline described earlier, LM 2.0 was built in June 1990 but hardly anyone had any chance at all to install it before September 1990 due to the dependency on MS OS/2 1.21. And the password already expired on September 10, 1990!
It is unsurprising that Microsoft published KB article Q64747 to deal with this exact problem.
Testers and OEMs, needless to say, did not immediately run into this problem because they installed LAN Manager 2.0 within the three months before the admin password expired. But the password had just about enough time to expire before copies got to any end users or even reviewers. A truly creative way to shoot oneself in the foot.
The LM 2.0b update no longer suffers from the pre-expired password.
WD EtherCard Driver Crash
Installing LAN Manager 2.0 with the Western Digital EtherCard driver (MACWD.OS2) using defaults will crash the system as soon as a packet is recieved… at least when the EtherCard is also configured with the default settings.
The culprit is the memory mapping; the EtherCard default is memory at segment D000h, but LAN Manager defaults to D400h. The PROTOCOL.INI file needs to be edited to avoid this crash. The I/O base (280h) and IRQ (3) defaults are fine.
Curiously, the README.TXT in the MACWD driver directory says that the ramaddress parameter default is D000 (which would have been the correct value), but the PROTOCOL.INI file for the driver contains the line
ramaddress = 0xd400
which overrides the default and causes problems.
The Etherlink II (3Com 3C503) driver uses sane defaults and works out of the box.
Goodies
The pirated copy of LAN Manager 2.0 includes some rather interesting bits that end users would not have seen, which strongly suggests someone copied disks that were distributed to OEMs or perhaps 3rd party developers back in the day.
The LAN Manager disks include debugging symbols for several core components, both for OS/2 and DOS.
The copy of MS OS/2 1.21 includes debugging symbols for core components, as well as a debug version of Presentation Manager (see screenshot above), and also a debug kernel.
The debug kernel does not run on any halfway modern CPUs without patching because, like other Microsoft system debuggers of the era with 386 support, it accesses test registers that were removed from the Intel Pentium and later processors.
I wish I’d had the debug symbols when digging into the MS OS/2 1.21 disk driver (included in BASEDD01.SYS)… but that’s life.
All in all, the original LAN Manager 2.0 with MS OS/2 1.21 and all the debug and symbol disks is an interesting piece of history.
Files
The re-created disk images used to write this article are available here. This includes both MS OS/2 1.21 and LAN Manager 2.0.