ncpfs—Novell Netware Connectivity for Linux

My school, the Hebrew University High School in Jerusalem Israel (www.leyada.jlm.k12.il) decided to go on-line about one year ago. We had a 60-computer Novell network already up and running, and we dedicated one DX4-100 for the job of Internet server. However, in many cases students and teachers wanted (or were required) to write their own WWW pages. At first, that person would write a page, and I would copy it to the Internet server manually. This is a very clumsy solution that worked only at first, and it doesn't allow the user to edit their pages.

At some point I found ncpfs. It was a very experimental project then, but it did most of what I needed it to do. Right now, our Novell server (freud.leyada.jlm.k12.il) is always mounted by our Linux Internet server (www.leyada.jlm.k12.il) as /novell (a cron script checks that this is so, and mounts the server if not). The httpd web server automatically looks for pages in a specific directory inside the Novell hierarchy, which solves the problem. This directory, say G:\WWW, contains our entire home page. When a student wishes to create a home page, he requests that a directory be opened for him under that directory, say G:\WWW\HOME\JOE. He receives Novell write permission to that directory, and is able to edit HTML files with his favorite web editor. This technique also allows everyone to use DOS and Windows to edit HTML files, which in our case is what the Novell clients run. Therefore, a user edits an HTML file through Windows and checks it with Netscape, while the page is LIVE, since the Linux machine mounts the Novell server.