Make my own web site - Mounting a Remote NetWare Volume IPX is commonly
Mounting a Remote NetWare Volume IPX is commonly used to mount NetWare volumes in the Linux filesystem. This allows file-based data sharing between other operating systems and Linux. Volker Lendecke developed the NCP client for Linux and a suite of associated tools that make data sharing possible. In an NFS environment, we’d use the Linux mount command to mount the remote filesystem. Unfortunately, the NCP filesystem has unique requirements that make it impractical to build it into the normal mount. Linux has an ncpmount command that we will use instead. The ncpmount command is one of the tools in Volker’s ncpfs package, which is available prepackaged in most modern distributions or in source form from ftp.gwdg.de in the /pub/linux/misc/ncpfs/ directory. The version current at the time of writing is 2.2.0. Before you can mount remote NetWare volumes, you must ensure your IPX network interface is configured correctly (as described earlier). Next, you must know your login details on the NetWare server you wish to mount; this includes the user ID and password. Lastly, you need to know which volume you wish to mount and what local directory you wish to mount it under. A Simple ncpmount Example A simple example of ncpmount usage looks like this: # ncpmount -S ALES_F1 -U rick -P d00-b-gud /mnt/brewery This command mounts all volumes of the ALES_F1 fileserver under the /mnt/brewery directory, using the Net- Ware login rick with the password d00-b-gud. The ncpmount command is normally setuid to root and may therefore be used by any Linux user. By default, that user owns the connection and only he or the root user will be able to unmount it. NetWare embodies the notion of a volume, which is analogous to a filesystem in Linux. A NetWare volume is the logical representation of a NetWare filesystem, which might be a single disk partition be spread across many partitions. By default, the Linux NCPFS support treats volumes as subdirectories of a larger logical filesystem represented by the whole fileserver. The ncpmount command causes each of the NetWare volumes of the mounted fileserver to appear as a subdirectory under the mount point. This is convenient if you want access to the whole server, but for complex technical reasons you will be unable to re-export these directories using NFS, should you wish to do so. We’ll discuss a more complex alternative that works around this problem in a moment. The ncpmount Command in Detail The ncpmount has a large number of command line options that allow you quite a lot of flexibility in how you manage your NCP mounts. The most important of these are described in Table 15.2.