Help, please - floundering in ignorance about DOS network drivers

Mar 1 01:48 UTC 1994

The company I work for (not me, personally) recently had to hook a Unix
machine into an existing network for one of our clients.  There were various
little glitches, but much of it was pretty smooth given that we didn't have
too much experience with this.  But an unexpected problem has cropped up:
The main network is a Novell network of PCs (IBM-clone-type), and we needed
to give these PCs the ability to log in as terminals on the Unix system;
but one group also needed to be able to log in as terminals on some kind of
IBM mini.  So we have three separate protocols going on one physical network,
which seems to work fine - except that this one group of PCs has to load
3 different sets of drivers, and there's not enough memory left to run
stuff.  I'm told that stuff has been loaded high as much as possible.
(The Unix machine is using TCP/IP, the Novell server IPX, and I forget
what the other one is.  My impression is that to the Unix system the
terminal emulator using the TCP/IP must look like a telnet session.
I think some other stuff would also be possible using the package in
question.)

The workaround was to just give up on the network for one of these
purposes, & use a serial terminal emulation.  I think other possibilities
include running something on the Novell server to let it use TCP/IP too,
and running something on the Unix machine to let it use IPX - both of which
(I gather) would cost something; I don't know how much.  (This is not my
baby, but I was given an outline and asked for advice.  Just as I'm doing
for you all.)

Does anyone know of anything else that might be done?  Preferably cheap but
good?