New Novell Client for Linux Beta

Holding true to promises made at Brainshare this year, Novell has released a public beta of a NCP (Novell Core Protocols) client for Linux workstations. The client makes it easier to integrate Linux desktops and laptops into a Novell network with NetWare and OES Linux servers. The client has similar functionality to the win32 client for Novell networks. It allows users to authenticate to eDirectory, and to connect to Novell NCP shared storage, complying with all the same complex rights capabilities that are applicable on the win32 client. It allows users to modify trustees, if authorized to do so, and it parses login scripts to connect the user’s filesystem to the same server-side filesystems that they would have mapped-drive access to under Windows clients. Users can also salvage files (recover deleted files on NSS filesystems) and purge deleted files.

I’d also like to mention that my voice was heard at Brainshare by the Novell client engineers. They demonstrated a client at Branishare that would parse login scripts and essentially create mounted NCP filesystems in your home directory on Linux, named after the drive letters that would be assigned to Windows users. I requested that they allow the mount point root location to be configurable so users would not have to have them in their home directories, but allow them to choose a different location, for example a Novell subdirectory or something. Novell has included this functionality in the client.

I’ve been running the client on my SLP9.3 laptop for a few days, and aside from a few things that Novell indicated in the README that weren’t quite done yet, it has been working rather well. It doesn’t completely faithfully parse our (exceedingly complex) login scripts entirely correctly, but it does pretty well.