Emulating NetWare on Linux

You can have Linux emulate other operating systems, so that
their respective clients can log into it. For example, you can configure Samba
and have Windows clients log into it. You can configure NFS and connect it to
other Linux or Unix machines. You can also configure it to act as a NetWare
server, so that Windows machines running NetWare clients can access it. Clients
would consider it another NetWare server and be able to do file and printer
sharing. This is a good solution if you have a NetWare network and want to use a
new linux server. Let’s see how to configure Linux to act as a NetWare server.

You must have IPX configured on the Linux box as the first
step. If you’re using Linux (from the June 2000 PCQ CD), choose IPX-NetWare
support during installation. You can’t add NetWare support later without
recompiling the kernel. The NetWare emulator that gets installed is called mars
(Martin Stovers NetWare Emulator).

Once the emulator is installed, you have to configure the
nwserv.conf file in the /etc directory. Open the file with a Linux text editor.
The file has detailed comments explaining how to configure each parameter. Each
configuration line is numbered and is called a section.

The file already defines a SYS and a CDROM volume that can be
accessed by clients. You can also make other directories accessible. For
example, suppose you want to make /tmp and /opt accessible to the clients, add:

1 TEMP /tmp k

1 OPT /opt k

Next, you have to give a name for the Linux NetWare server in
section 2. The line is commented by default, so you can remove the comment,
which will name your server as:

2 Mars

In place of Mars, you can also specify another name for your
server, like PCQ.

Leave section 3 as it is. The fourth section is in the form:

4

This section configures the IPX network. Several commented
sample lines are given. You can select one of these. We chose the following:

4 0x10 eth0 802.3 1

Now, leave the sections below this at their default values,
and move on to section 12. In this section, you have to map a user account on
your Linux machine, which would be the administrator of the NetWare server. You
can do this as follows:

12 SUPERVISOR pcq pcql

Here "pcq" is a Linux login account and "pcql"
is the account’s password. As this password is in clear text, be sure to set
the right file access permissions to this file.

You can associate or map Linux logins to NetWare logins as:

13 nwuser1 user1 userpass

Here, "nwuser1" is the login name supplied for the
NetWare server and it’s mapped to the account "user1" on the Linux
machine. The password–"userpass"–is optional. If you don’t give
it, then the corresponding Linux user password will be used.

Now jump to section 21, which defines the printer attached to
this machine, and make the following changes:

21 LP SYS:/PRINT/LP lpr

Here, "LP" is the printer share name a NetWare
client will see. The next set defines the printer queue. Finally "lpr"
is the print command executed on the Linux machine. You should already have
configured a printer in Linux for this to work.

Finally, save the file and start the NetWare emulation server
by typing:

nwserv

If everything goes well, you won’t see any error messages.
If you do get an error message, check the log file– mars_new. log–in the /var/log
directory.

Alternatively, you can also start the server as:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/mars-nwe start

In this case, errors may not be displayed on the command
line, but will be recorded directly in the log file. The server can be stopped
with:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/mars-nwe stop

Client access

Go to a machine running a NetWare client. As this NetWare
server runs only in Bindery mode, you have to specify the server name only. Give
the username and password that you defined in the nwserv.conf file, and it
should log you in, and also map the volumes to drive letters automatically. For
more information, see IPX-HOWTO on the Red Hat Linux CD.

Shekhar Govindarajan