Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Mounting a Remote NetWare Volume

IPX is commonly used to mount NetWare volumes in the Linux filesystem. This allows file-based data sharing between other operating systems and Linux. Volker Lendecke developed the NCP client for Linux and a suite of associated tools that make data sharing possible.

In an NFS environment, we’d use the Linux mount command to mount the remote filesystem. Unfortunately, the NCP filesystem has unique requirements that make it impractical to build it into the normal mount. Linux has an ncpmount command that we will use instead. The ncpmount command is one of the tools in Volker’s ncpfs package, which is available prepackaged in most modern distributions or in source form from ftp://ftp.gwdg.de in the /pub/linux/misc/ncpfs/ directory. The version current at the time of writing is 2.2.0.

Before you can mount remote NetWare volumes, you must ensure your IPX network interface is configured correctly (as described earlier). Next, you must know your login details on the NetWare server you wish to mount; this includes the user ID and password. Lastly, you need to know which volume you wish to mount and what local directory you wish to mount it under.

A Simple ncpmount Example

A simple example of ncpmount usage looks like this:

# ncpmount -S ALES_F1 -U rick -P d00-b-gud /mnt/brewery

This command mounts all volumes of the ALES_F1 fileserver under the /mnt/brewery directory, using the NetWare login rick with the password d00-b-gud.

The ncpmount command is normally ...