File Sharing over the Web

NetWare 6 is the next big version of the OS from Novell after NetWare 5.1. It holds many promising features such as 32x32 node clustering capability, iFolder, Novell Storage Services (NSS) 3.0, a

multiprocessing- enabled kernel, which can distribute multiple threads from applications to different processors for simultaneous execution. It also features a 64-bit architecture to support the upcoming Intel Itanium processor. It also has a new feature called Novell Internet printing, which supports printing over the Internet, as well as location based printing. The iFolder is a concept whereby all your files can be accessed over the Internet using a Web browser. This eliminates the need for any clients when accessing your files. NetWare 6 is targeted at large organizations having 1,000 or more users. In this article, we’ll take you through configuring an interesting feature of the new OS, called iFolder, which let’s you do file sharing over the Web or from any machine at any location.

Setting up iFolder



One much talked about feature in NetWare 6 is the iFolder. This allows you to be in touch with your data no matter where you are. So whether they’re on your office desktop, laptop, or home PC, you’ll be able to access them over the Internet. You can access your files even if you’re on a remote machine with a Web browser and an Internet connection. Not only that, but all of them would be updated by the central NetWare server. This sounds very promising, as you don’t have to download a complete file every time you make a change in it.

iFolder will just update the file with the changes you made. So suppose you have a 10 MB presentation, and you made a few changes to it worth a few kB. iFolder will not send this entire updated 10 MB presentation across the Internet to synchronize. Instead, it will just send that incremental 15 kB change you made. This helps users by providing anytime anywhere access to their files. It also provides administrators the ease of backing up critical data sitting on users’ laptops and desktops. As far as security is concerned, iFolder contents are stored and transmitted in the Blowfish encryption scheme. We tried out iFolder in our lab to really understand how it works, and here’s how it’s done. 

iFolder on the server



You can install iFolder on your NetWare 6 server by choosing the iFolder Storage Services option from the product selection window. This will show you the default IP address and corresponding ports used by iFolder. You can change these if you want, but we went with the default. Next it asks for the kind of encryption mode you want to set for your LDAP server, which is the NDS eDirectory in this case. Here, you can either set encryption or click the check box to allow clear text password. Once this is done, define the path for the iFolder, which by default is sys:\ifolder. You can change this as per your setup, and click the Finish button. 

Configuring iFolder clients



Once the iFolder server is ready, you need to configure the clients to be able to use it. First, you need a DNS server that will map the iFolder’s IP address and port number to a domain name. For our tests, we added the IP address and domain name in the hosts file of our client machine.

iFolder is also available for NetWare 5.1, Windows NT 4.0/2000. For this to work, you just need an LDAP v3 compliant server.

Anil Chopra and Sanjay Majumder