Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 11:46:42 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: jimd@mistery.mcafee.com (Jim Dennis) Cc: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu, e9203125@pegasus.cpd.unb.br, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Netware & Free Message-ID: <199607021846.LAA08579@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <201007020703.AAA22912@mistery.mcafee.com> from "Jim Dennis" at Jul 2, 96 05:10:31 am
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> Linux -- look for 'ncpfs' (free) or get the Caldera > CND (Network Desktop) distribution which includes > bindery and NDS client support. The key developers > at Caldera were engineers in the advanced research > group at Novell before Ray Noorda left them. They have > lots of info about the inner workings of NCP (netware core > protocols) and the licenses to use that knowlege in > Caldera's products. Caldera's team also contributed some > of the IPX code back to the Linux community (in the spirit > of the GPL under which they're using it) Specifically, Brian Sparks, Gary Tomlinson, and Ted Cowan were the engineers on the original NUC (NetWare UNIX Client) product, and Brian Sparks and Drew Spencer (and I forget) were the engineers on the original PNW (Portable NetWare) product, which was later renamed to NWU (NetWare for UNIX). Brian Sparks is the founding father of Caldera, formerly the Novell "Corsair" project. It's been more than a year, so I think this qualifies as "history". Everybody else is still with Novell (or USL). NB: Contrary to what Steve Jobs says in his video, Novell came to him, he didn't come to Novell. NUC was the idea of a small number of very brilliant people at Novell, and not just the three lead engineers on the NUC code proper; it was developed on NeXT machines, but they had to go so far as to write their own streams to get it to work. Unless there was seperate licensing (which I don't think there was, since they are using bindery instead of directory services technology), their server requires that you copy files to it from a licensed Novell server before it is usable, since they don't have their own copies of slist/nlist/login/etc.. In all likelihood, they are probably at the NetWare 3.x level, and probably an abbreviated 3.x for all of that... Novell has a long history of grandfathering interfaces and a reluctance to throw out old technology (like some core teams we know.. ;-)). It would take an "act of God" to implement a full server because of the backward compatability issues back to NetWare 1.x. > I've got some people upstairs using ncpfs with > moderate success (some complain that the performance seems lacking > and they sometimes experience "glitches" -- but for convenient > interactive use it seems to fill the bill (I just wouldn't try to > use it in mission and time critical applications yet). I've looked at the NCPFS code. It is nowhere *near* the level of the NUC code (which I code reviewed before leaving Novell) after Steve Baumel (the SVR4.2 SMP VM designer) had gotton done with it. I estimate it would take 3-5 man years to get it to that level (unless they threw someone at it who had experience with serious kernel multithreading issues and FS design issues; I'd probably be "contaminated", unless Brian Sparks isn't -- in which case it would take about 1 man year; I could name 3 or 4 other people with enough familiarity with the NUC code where it might even take less time than that). > One of > my boxes runs Caldera. I've never had the slightest problem > with access Netware file servers under it. I havent' tried any > things special yet (re-exporting the mounted NCP directory via > NFS for example) Don't *ever* do this. You think NFS distributed cache coherency (basically, timer-based) is bad, you haven't seen anything yet. If this is an allowed configuration, it is an error in judgement on the part of Caldera. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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