MARS_NWE

This is Mars_nwe, a free NetWare emulator for Linux originally written by Martin Stover of Marburg, Germany.

Current Development Status

The last release by the original author was on 1 September 2000. Marco Cavallini of Koan Software produced version 0.99.pl21 on or around 14 June 2003. Mario Fetka (@geos_one) released version 0.99.pl22 on 21 May 2012 and 0.99.pl23 on 5 November 2013.

No further work has been done on this in public since 2013. While it all builds and runs on modern linux systems (surprisingly) there are a lot of build warnings and many missing features to be dealt with as well as bugs to be found and squashed.

About This Repository

This repository was initially produced to see what the differences were between the few most recent versions of mars_nwe, in particular the versions not produced by the original author. Most other versions going back to 0.96 have also been imported to see how it changed over time. The source archives used to build this repo can be found here.

What can Mars_nwe do?

From the old README file:

mars_nwe is a very functional clone of a NetWare server that runs under Linux. It works fine with the usual DOS client software that normally comes with your NetWare server.
mars_nwe offers file, bindery and print services for NetWare client software.
mars_nwe does not include any user license restrictions. You can increase mars_nwe's licenses by simply recompiling it, and you can start any number of mars_nwe's on your network!
mars_nwe includes a RIP/SAP daemon that turns your Linux box into a fine IPX router.

Related packages include:

mars_dosutils: Some utilities that should free you from having to use proprietary utilities when you want to use mars_nwe with DOS clients. These are now in the dosutils directory of this repository
ncpfs: a linux-only filesystem allowing you to mount volumes exported by NetWare servers on your linux box.
ipx kernel module for Linux: this is required to run mars_nwe on versions of Linux newer than 4.17.

WARNING Security

This code has not been actively maintained in over two decades. The network protocol it implements is even older than that. THERE WILL BE SECURITY VULNERABILITIES. If you decide to run this please do so on a private network only.

In particular, since version 0.99.pl9 mars_nwe has made filesystem calls as the root user in order to handle trustees so this may be a source of security issues.

Installing

With the IPX Kernel Module installed you should be able to just go:

cmake .
make
sudo make install

Once thats done you'll need to edit /usr/local/etc/mars_nwe/nwserv.conf to:

Give your server a name (section 2)
Set ethernet frame types and IPX network numbers (section 4, you may be able to skip this if you have no other NetWare servers on your LAN)
Give the supervisor user a password (section 12)

You should probably read all the comments in the server configuration file in case there are any other settings you wish to customise.

You'll also want to edit /var/mars_nwe/SYS/public/net$log.dat and replace the default login script with something sensible like:

MAP INS S1:=SYS:PUBLIC
MAP *1:=SYS:

Once all that's done you should be able to start mars_nwe by running the following as root:

mkdir -p /var/log/mars_nwe
mkdir -p /var/run/mars_nwe
nwserv

To make it start automatically you can put the above in /etc/rc.local or, even better, write a systemd unit file.

Lastly you'll need a client. The best one for DOS and Windows 3.11 is probably Client32 v2.71 from February 1999 which uses at most 4K of conventional memory (386SX or better CPU and a few MB of extended memory required). For other operating systems (or older DOS machines) you can grab another client from here. Note that Mars_NWE won't work with the Mac client as that needs NDS (NetWare 4.0+) which Mars_NWE does not implement.

NetWare DOS & OS/2 Utilities

mars_nwe only comes with the bare minimum required to login and map drives on DOS. You can get some other utilities (such as flag and ncopy) from the NetWare DOS Client Kit v3.01 (released in 1990) which was made freely available by Novell. You can get it from this page (DSWIN3.ZIP and DSWIN4.ZIP). These utilities would normally live in /var/mars_nwe/SYS/public/

For OS/2, some of the client kits for OS/2 include updated 16bit OS/2 utilities (usually the OS2UTIL disks) which may fill some gaps. Four EXEs (attach, login, map, slist) should go in /var/mars_nwe/SYS/login/OS2/ while the rest go in /var/mars_nwe/SYS/public/OS2/.

For other utilities such as SysCon you may need to obtain a proper copy of NetWare 3.11 or 3.12.

For NetWare 3.x servers this is normally done with the SYSCON utility for DOS. Mars_NWE doesn't include any replacement for this utility and the original Novell one is probably out of bounds unless you've got a NetWare 3 license.

One alternative is WnSyscon, a 16bit windows SYSCON replacement. Novell actually bundled the registered version of this with NetWare 3.2 as their Graphical SYSCON Utility. You can grab the ShareWare version from here - it seems to be fully functional aside from a few nag screens. Unfortunaltely buying a copy of NetWare 3.2 is probably the only way to get a proper registered version of this today unless the original author can be contacted somehow.

Where To Get Help

There is some very old documentation available here which may be of interest. The old linware mailing list archives may still contain useful information as well. There is also a few additional notes here. If you can't find a solution to a problem in any of those places the only remaining option is probably reading the code.

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