This is version 0.8 of ncpfs, a free NetWare client filesystem for Linux. This one currently works with Kernel 1.2.13. I do not know whether it works with any other kernel of the 1.2.x series, I only used it with 1.2.13. Due to problems in the 1.3.x IPX kernel code, ncpfs-0.8 does NOT work with any 1.3.x kernel up to 1.3.45, although there is a kernel-1.3 subdirectory. It compiles fine and seems to work, but any connection will block after a very short time. Please be patient. I'm sure this will be solved. If you follow the kernel development closely, you might want to try ncpfs with a kernel later than 1.3.45, but I can not promise anything. To try it with 1.3, simply change the variable KERNEL in the Makefile from 1.2 to 1.3 and continue as usual. To install ncpfs, just type 'make'. After that, you find the neccessary kernel module and the mounting tools in ./bin. Type 'insmod ncpfs.o' and then 'ncpmount server mount-point'. For further information, please look at the manual pages in ./man. Please note that your IPX system has to be configured correctly. If you want to take the 'Plug-and-Play' route, you can simply say 'ipx_configure --auto_interface=on --auto_primary=on'. If ncpmount does not work immediately, you should wait for about 1 minute and try again. In that period, an IPX packet should have passed by and your network interface should have configured itself automatically. If all that does not work and you want to do the configuration by hand, note that there has to be a route to the internal network of your server. Please see the file util/start_ipx for an example. I use tools written by Greg Page, Caldera. I hope I did not do too much harm to their business. For your convenience I included the file ipx.tar made available by Caldera. My main source of information is a book written in german by Manfred Hill and Ralf Zessin, "Netzwerkprogrammierung in C", IWT Verlag GmbH, 1995, ISBN 3-88322-491-X. It contains quite a lot of typographical and other errors, but I find it very valuable as an introduction to NCP programming. If you know about the concepts and possibilities of NCP, Ralph Brown's interrupt list becomes much more readable. It's much easier to find undocumented information if you know what to look for! For the curious: the file ncplib_user.[ch] is a library that makes it possible to send NCP requests to the server over a mounted directory. I use it to keep the encryption stuff out of the kernel by logging in from user space. Look at the file ncptest.c for other possible uses. I use ncptest to check my assumptions about the widely undocumented NetWare Core Protocol. Maybe this is the beginning of a free NetWare API for Linux! I would be happy to receive your comments on this. LIMITATIONS (compare these with smbfs :-) The limitations ncpfs has are the natural limitations of the NCP protocol, which was designed with MS-DOS based PCs in mind. The first limitation is the lack of uid, gid and permission information per file. You have to assign those values once for a complete mounted directory. The second limitation is just as annoying as the first: You cannot re-export a ncp-mounted directory by nfs. It is not possible because the NFS protocol defines access to files through unique file handles, which can be mapped to the device and inode numbers in unix NFS servers. NCP does not have unique numbers per file, you only have the path name. I implemented a caching scheme for inode numbers, which gives unique inode numbers for every open file in the system. This is just sufficient for local use of the files, because you can tell when an inode number can be discarded. With NFS the situation is different. You can never know when the client will access the file-id you offered, so you would have to cache the inode numbers indefinitely long. I think this should not be done in kernel mode, as it would require an unlimited amount of RAM.