Topic: Netware & Windows Networking with E-Smith

[George Plymale]

We are trying to set up a test bed to migrate our entire network to TCP/IP from Netware.  Let me give the structure with which we are working then present the problem:

We currently have a router that provides Internet access to the intranet which is connected to a switch.  A Netware server and the SMS Server with which I am working branch from this switch.  Another switch is connected to the other side of the SMS Server/firewall.  Various computers including a Windows 2000 terminal server (Citrix) is connected come off of the switch connected to the SMS Server.  The Windows 2000 Server needs to pull files from the Netware server which resides above the firewall back on the first switch I mentioned, however I am unable to pass an IPX/SPX connection through the SMS Server to the Netware server and thus allow thin clients on a workgroup to access the files shared from the Netware server on the Windows 2000 terminal server.  Thus my question:  How can I enable the SMS Server/firewall to allow it to pass traffic back and forth between the Netware server and the Windows 2000 server?

Once this testbed is finished and working, this SMS Server will be placed immediately between the router and the intranet to allow DHCP to broadcast down to the entire intranet.  We are doing this to eventually eradicate the Netware services and go with pure TCP/IP.  Then the file sharing will be done with either SMS Server or Win2k, but an upper level agency will need to pass through the firewall to pull data files from the file server... I'd imagine that's as simple as adding them to hosts.allow, but the Netware problem has spinning our wheels for the moment.

Thanks much for any and all help!

[David]

I'm not 100% about this but I believe Linux can't act as a IPX/SPX router by itself.

There are netware emulation packages around which may help.

Hope this helps.

Regards

David.

[George Plymale]

Does anyone know of any client software available to allow us to integrate temporarily with the Netware intranet?  I am hesitant to install development packages to recompile the kernel on this machine...  If there are no client options available without recompiling the kernel, can someone supply a module that works with the most recent SMS Server?  This would definitely help migration.

Thanks for any more help or ideas.

[bart]

Why not use SME as the Netware-server? No need to recompile kernels for Netware server support AFAIK, and you could use Mars_NWE (netware emulator).

On RH / SME :
 http://www.redhat.com/support/resources/tips/Netware/netware.html

[Boris]

For the transition period you could connect both switches (leaving everything else as it is) with a cable. TCP/IP will not go through since two networks are on the different subnets (If I understand it right), but IPX will. Otherwise you need to install and configure IPX routing on SME or enable bridging on it. I may be messy .