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Getting there...
Authored by: richardjenkins on Jun 11, '02 06:50:31AM

I work at a University where we have 70-odd Novell servers, plenty of Macs, AppleTalk, and all manner of nasty windows stuff. We have a pretty good licensing arrangement with Novell, so I'm afraid I can't comment on value for money...

One of my jobs at the moment is to work out how to provide equitable services for Mac clients accessing Novell Netware services, and I can assure you, this has it's moments. Early days yet but I think we're getting there.

Here's my understanding of what is required:

Novell Netware server must be 5.1 or 6
Directory Services must be eDirectory 8.5 or better (8.5 is current)
NFAP package installed, which includes the mac namespace.NLM and the AFP.TCP.NLM
NFS.TCP NLM

In theory, this will give you AFP 2.2 services (AppleTalk over IP) and will store and display mac file names and file resource forks in an appropriate fashion for mac clients. I've even stored disk images on the server without corruption, which was a problem under NW4.1

NFAP uses the Novell 'simple password' which gets stored in a different spot from the normal password, so there's some synchronization issues to be tackled there.
We've tried a couple of variations and keep an eye out for patches and updates, because it's not working very well. It's definitely improved since I started testing under 10.0.4 though.

In testing, I compare our Novell test environment with an ASIP 6.13 server and a Linux/Samba server, using OS 9 and OS X clients, reading and writing the same set of files back and forth.

NFAP for OS 9 clients is solid, with rapid connects and good throughput, comparable with the competing services. Under OS X connects are comparable, reads are fast, but writes are deplorably slow, then the connection drops out with a type -36 error (I/O error).

There seems to be some problem with AFP 3 and NFAP, because the ASIP service is rock solid, and the Samba share stays up most of the time too. At the moment we're a bit puzzled as to where Novell went wrong.

When (if!) we make any significant progress I'll post the solution.



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Getting there...
Authored by: dave@mmu on Jun 13, '02 05:08:30AM

Hi, i got it working fine under OS9 but in OSX i had password problems. I'll have another look at the problem one day.
Dave



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