"Mike Ball" writes:

We are looking at implementing Network Appliance filers into a shared NT and Novell environment. I understand as long as "Client for Microsoft Networking" is loaded on the Novell clients and as long as the Novell users are being authenticated by the NT domain when they cross over to access the filer, the Novell users will be able to store/retrieve their files on the Netapp. My question is has anyone using Novell 5 in this environment ran into any issues with the filer?

Our department is primarily an NFS shop with an NT domain for the PCs running NT Workstation or NT Terminal Server that want to access the same home directories via CIFS. This works extremely well for us.

However, our University is a Novell shop, so some of our users have to have access to Netware volumes in other departments or faculties.

What we've discovered is (some of this is from slightly hazy memory; I'm the UNIX and filer admin, I only use PCs occassionally): * you should really have an NT domain to authenticate the CIFS sessions. As long as the users have the Netware client configured to synchronise passwords things should be ok on that front (log in once, and one password gets you to your NT and Netware drives) * depending on which system type you access more frequently (NT or Netware objects), you may want to tweak the `Network Services Order' (or whatever it's called) in the Control Panels -> Network section. Because our PCs are primarily accessing CIFS drives, we move Microsoft's requestor above the Netware one. We found that browsing objects through Network Neighbourhood that are of the `lower priority' type can take a while, especially if the primary `tree' is big and/or slow. * I've found the Netware client to be slow and buggy, when compared to the standard NT domain client.

Due to (misguided, IMHO) university policies about `single sign-on through the central Netware NDS', we will be trialling the use of NDS for NT as a replacement for our NT domain; this may (assuming it works) make it easier for users with respect to password/account details. That would mean we wouldn't have to install the Netware client on most machines either (see above).

Luke.