Mounting Netware volumes

[Stefan Bruda]

Hi all.

Except for the Department of Computing Science (which is slowly
migrating to TCP/IP), Bishop's University uses Novell Netware.  My
department is migrating as I said, but for the time being still uses
the Novell thing, so I have been trying for some time to mount Netware
volumes to my Linux boxes.

One of these boxes (my main machine) is a Tibook running a modified
YDL 2.2 (in particular, kernel 2.4.20-pre7-ben0, ipxutils 2.2.0.18-6,
and ncpfs 2.2.0.18).

The other box (my office machine) is an IBM Netvista running Mandrake
8.0 out of the box (kernel 2.4.18-6mdk, ipxutils 2.2.0.18.a-3mdk, and
ncpfs 2.2.0.18).

I now configure the IPX interface on both machines, and the result is
absolutely the same (according to /proc/net/ipx* files anyway).  In
reality things are not quite the same, since `slist' does list the
available servers on the Tibook, but on the Netvista simply says
"Server not found (0x8847) in ncp_open."  Good for the Tibook (and
YDL) you'd say, but you would be wrong: despite the apparent lack of
server availability, I still try to mount the Netware tree on both
machines, using the same command, which looks like this:

    ncpmount ~/nwbishops

Of course, I have a .nwclient file (again, the same on both machines)
which contains a line like this:

    MAIN/ACCOUNT.OU=FACULTY.OU=USERS.OU=MAIN.O=BISHOPS password

where ACCOUNT and password are the actual account name and associated
password.  Both machines mount something, which looks similar at a
first sight.  However, the tree mounted on the Tibook is not complete.
For instance, I have

    [bruda@faculty-42 ~]$ ll nwbishops/home2/
    drwxr-xr-x    1 bruda    bruda         512 Sep 28 04:32 ASSOCIAT/
    drwxr-xr-x    1 bruda    bruda         512 Sep 20 14:21 FACULTY/

(as it should be) and 

    [bruda@Tibook ~]% ll nwbishops/home2/
    total 0

(sic!). In addition to having an incomplete Netware tree on the
Tibook, I can print alright to the Netware queues from the Netvista,
but all the print requests issued on the Tibook to the same queues are
unsuccessful (the--for me cryptic--error message says only "close
error").

I should also mention that `slist' on the Netvista suddenly begins to
return the full list of servers once I mount the Netware tree.

Any idea what the difference might be (and, most importantly, how to
fix the problem)?  Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks,
Stefan

-- 
If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as
it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.
    --Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass