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Emulating Netware on Linux
How to configure Linux to act as a Netware server.

You can have Linux emulate other operating systems, so that their repective 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 us see how to configure Linux to act as a Netware server.

You must have IPX configured on your Linux box as a first step. If you are using Linux chhose IPX-Netwre 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 comfigure 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 choose the following:

4 Ox10 eth0 802.3 1

Now leave this 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 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 is mapped to the account "user1" on the Linux machine. The password- "userpass"- is optional. If you dont five 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 can 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 to this to work.

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

nwserv

If everything goes well, you wont see any error messages. If you do get an error message, click 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 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-HOW TO on the Red Hat Linux CD.