Mike Fedyk wrote:

Rob Lines wrote:

...

I am trying to connect our centos 4.4 machines to our Novell Netware 5 servers.

The goal is to allow the centos 4.4 clients to connect to the server and access shared folders. We are not looking for a single sign-on style solution just the ability to connect.

Check into using ncpfs with centos. If not, then see if netware can serve to nfs or smb/cifs clients.

ncpfs is only in the centosplus kernel I believe. I also found it buggy and horribly slow. Instead, consider running Novell's Native File Access (NFA) product on your Netware server and exporting your Netware volumes as NFS or SMB shares. I don't think NFA is included with Netware 5.0 (though it might be a free dowload, not sure) but I know 6.x includes it.

Jay

On Thu, 2007-01-18 at 11:50 -0500, Jay Lee wrote:

Mike Fedyk wrote:

...

Rob Lines wrote:

...

I am trying to connect our centos 4.4 machines to our Novell Netware 5 servers.

The goal is to allow the centos 4.4 clients to connect to the server and access shared folders. We are not looking for a single sign-on style solution just the ability to connect.

Check into using ncpfs with centos. If not, then see if netware can serve to nfs or smb/cifs clients.

ncpfs is only in the centosplus kernel I believe. I also found it buggy and horribly slow.

Yes, you need to be using the CentOS Plus kernel and build the NCPFS rpms from fedora so you can mount the volumes.

It also does not hurt to have IPX enabled on Netware & Linux ... we have IPX enabled yet because we still use DOS and the old moldy 2.x client still seems to work best for our use.

I can see if dig out the information on what I did for the one C4 station I setup

Instead, consider running Novell's Native File Access (NFA) product on your Netware server and exporting your Netware volumes as NFS or SMB shares. I don't think NFA is included with Netware 5.0 (though it might be a free dowload, not sure) but I know 6.x includes it.

Jay _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

On Fri, 2007-01-19 at 08:45 -0500, Rob Lines wrote:

On 1/18/07, Paul subsolar@subsolar.com wrote: On Thu, 2007-01-18 at 11:50 -0500, Jay Lee wrote: > Mike Fedyk wrote: > > Rob Lines wrote: > >> I am trying to connect our centos 4.4 machines to our Novell Netware > >> 5 servers. > >> > >> The goal is to allow the centos 4.4 clients to connect to the server > >> and access shared folders. We are not looking for a single sign-on > >> style solution just the ability to connect. > > > > Check into using ncpfs with centos. If not, then see if netware can > > serve to nfs or smb/cifs clients. > ncpfs is only in the centosplus kernel I believe. I also found it buggy > and horribly slow.

    Yes, you need to be using the CentOS Plus kernel and build the
    NCPFS
    rpms from fedora so you can mount the volumes.

    It also does not hurt to have IPX enabled on Netware &
    Linux ... we have 
    IPX enabled yet because we still use DOS and the old moldy 2.x
    client
    still seems to work best for our use.

    I can see if dig out the information on what I did for the one
    C4
    station I setup

I definatly would like to see that info if you can find it.

The thing that took the more work to figure out was setting up the repository setting so that the only thing I would get from the centos plus repository was the kernel. I'll have to grab the config once I get into work.

After setting up the repo and installing the centos plus kernel the next thing was go get a copy of the ncpfs source rpm from the fedora repository and rebuild it on centos. One change I did have to make to the spec file was setting the permissions for ncpmount and ncpumount to suid root.

After installing the ncpfs rpm I needed to enable IPX for networking by modifying the /etc/sysconfig/network file to add lines like the following: IPX=yes IPXAUTOFRAME=on IPXAUTOPRIMAY=on IPXINTERNALNETNUM=

I rebooted the system and did a slist to to see if it could find any servers. That went OK so the final step was to install a GUI for the end user to log into the server and mount the volumes. For that I compiled gtknw2 from source (http://gtknw2.sourceforge.net) and tested that out.

I'll have to flesh this out more monday when I can get a look at the system. One thing that probably should be done different is to put the IPX settings in the /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0 file instead. I did have a doc on doing all this on RHL 7.3 ... that might be a good starting point for the interface configuration.

I need to document this properly anyways, I'll have something better, but this might get you started.

The one question that I do have is what effect the move to the CentOS Plus kernel would have other than allowing us access to the ncpfs? The users are power users that mostly maintain their own machines and handle their own updates. What issues could come up by using the new kernel rather than the base one?

It would add some legacy drivers and a few additional network protocols like IPX, Appletalk, Decnet etc. I don't foresee any real issue especially if they don't have root permissions on the workstations.

I would definitely be careful how you mount the file systems. Also, there is theoretically the possibility of security issues with the ncpmount & ncpumount commands being SUID root, but I'm not aware of any outstanding security bugs currently.

Regards, Paul

So it took a while to get a few days free to test this and work up our internal documentation (thank you vmware)

Paul, your process was excellent. We were able to change a few things in our environment because we are not using IPX for communication.

For our users the process has been condensed down to: ------ How do I access the Novell Servers?

Open a terminal window and su - root to get a root shell.

Go to the directory with the yum configuration files with cd /etc/yum.repos.d and open the CentOS-Base.repo file.

Find the [update] section and add the line exclude=kernel kernel-smp to the bottom of the entry.

Find the [centosplus] section and change the enabled=0 to enabled=1 and add the line includepkg=kernel kernel-smp to the end of the entry.

Check what kernel type you are using. Run the command uname -r and look at the end of the output for the tag smp

If there was no smp in the last output update the kernel with the command yum update kernel. If the output had smp update the kernel with the command yum update kernel-smp.

Download the IPX utils and NCPFS rpms. (We rebuild the two srpms once and house them on an internal web server)

Install the rpms with the command rpm -i ipxutils-2.2.6-5.i386.rpm and rpm -i ncpfs-2.2.6-5.i386.rpm

Reboot the machine so that it boots with the new kernel and log back in.

Make a directory in your home directory for the NW01 server with the command mkdir nw01

To actualy connect to the novell servers use the following command ncpmount -S NW01 -A x.x.x.x nw01 -U USERNAME.users.tree -P PASSWORD replace the USERNAME and PASSWORD with your Novell username and password.

It will give no output if it completes sucessfuly. To check it go into the nw01 folder with cd nw01 and list the files with ls it should display the shares that you have access to on the main file server.

This command can be added to a script so that you do not have to type it every time. Make a new file in your home directory called novell.sh with the command touch novell.sh then open it in an editor. Add the following lines to the file and make sure to replace the username and password with your username and password

#!/bin/bash

ncpmount -S NW01 -A x.x.x.x nw01 -U USERNAME.users.tree -P PASSWORD

Now make the file exicutable by you and remove the permisions for anyone else to read the file with the command chmod 700 novell.sh

Now you can just run your script novell.sh to connect to the novell servers. -----

We did find that due to the use of the IP based servers that gtknw2 application would not properly mount those servers. The simple script above does the same thing.

Paul, and everyone else thank you for the help.

Rob

On 1/27/07, Paul subsolar@subsolar.com wrote:

On Fri, 2007-01-19 at 08:45 -0500, Rob Lines wrote:

...

On 1/18/07, Paul subsolar@subsolar.com wrote: On Thu, 2007-01-18 at 11:50 -0500, Jay Lee wrote: > Mike Fedyk wrote: > > Rob Lines wrote: > >> I am trying to connect our centos 4.4 machines to our Novell Netware > >> 5 servers. > >> > >> The goal is to allow the centos 4.4 clients to connect to the server > >> and access shared folders. We are not looking for a single sign-on > >> style solution just the ability to connect. > > > > Check into using ncpfs with centos. If not, then see if netware can > > serve to nfs or smb/cifs clients. > ncpfs is only in the centosplus kernel I believe. I also found it buggy > and horribly slow.

    Yes, you need to be using the CentOS Plus kernel and build the
    NCPFS
    rpms from fedora so you can mount the volumes.

    It also does not hurt to have IPX enabled on Netware &
    Linux ... we have
    IPX enabled yet because we still use DOS and the old moldy 2.x
    client
    still seems to work best for our use.

    I can see if dig out the information on what I did for the one
    C4
    station I setup

I definatly would like to see that info if you can find it.

The one question that I do have is what effect the move to the CentOS Plus kernel would have other than allowing us access to the ncpfs? The users are power users that mostly maintain their own machines and handle their own updates. What issues could come up by using the new kernel rather than the base one?

Thank you, Rob

OK here is what I've done so far ...

== Configure the CentOS Plus repository on the workstation ==

Edit the /etc/yum.repo.d/CentOS-Base.repo file and make the following changes:

Find the [update] section and add the following line: exclude=kernel kernel-smp

Find the [centosplus] section and change enabled=0 To enabled=1 Then add the line includepkg=kernel kernel-smp

Install the CentOS Plus kernel with the command "yum update kernel", once the new kernel is installed reboot the machine.

== Compile and Install the networking utilities ==

Download the ncpfs source RPM from the fedora core 6 repository

Install the ncpfs source rpm and edit the following lines in the spec file change the line chmod 755 $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr/bin/ncpmount $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr/bin/ncpumount to chmod 4755 $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr/bin/ncpmount $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr/bin/ncpumount

Build the actual RPMs using the command "rpmbuild –ba SPECS/ncpfs.spec" after which you will have ipxutils and ncpfs RPMs under the RPMS/i386 directory.

Install ipxutils & ncpfs RPMs built above

== Enable IPX Networking on the System ==

Edit /etc/sysconfig/network and add the following lines IPX=yes IPXAUTOPRIMARY=off IPXAUTOFRAME=off IPXINTERNALNODENUM=0 IPXINTERNALNETNUM=0

Edit /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0 and add the following lines: IPXACTIVE_802_2='yes' IPXPRIMARY_802_2='yes' IPXNETNUM_802_2='0xb0320002' (the netnum needs to be the correct one for the facility)

Restart the networking subsystem with the "service network restart" command, and then test IPX connectivity by issuing the "slist" command. If the workstation has IPX connectivity you should receive a list of local servers.

== Building and Installing GUI client for Novell Netware ==

Download the source file gtknw2-0.3.tar.bz2 for gtknw2 from gtknw2.sourceforge.net and then untar the application with the command "tar jxvf gtknw2-0.3.tar.bz2".

To build the application you will need the gtk2-devel package and it's requirements besides the compiler and usual requirements.

To build the application, perform the following commands: cd gtknw2-0.3 ./configure make su –c make install

Keep an eye out for errors during the configure & make steps.

== Configuring the GUI client to auto launch at login ==

Login as the user you want the login front end to automatically launch for and go into "Applictions|Preferences|More Preferences|Sessions" configuration tool and click on the "Startup Programs" tab and add /usr/local/bin/gtknw2 to the startup program list.

I still have not figured out how to have it automatically log out of netware when the user does ... anybody with suggestions I'm all ears.

Paul

---

CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

On 07/04/07, Paul subsolar@subsolar.com wrote: [SNIP]

That's about at the same priority as migrating the DOS shop floor systems from the 16bit Novell Client to the 32bit one. The old client works with the servers and the new client might not play well with the data collection apps.

Interesting solution that was implemented by me was to run DOS application under dosemu/xdosemu under thin client setup (and reusing all those old systems) using LTSP. Just created a common directory under home and ran the application from there. Or you can rdsektop/Xnest using desktop systems.