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 setuid to root and may therefore be used by any Linux user. By default, that user owns the connection and only he or the root user will be able to unmount it.

NetWare embodies the notion of a volume, which is analogous to a filesystem in Linux. A NetWare volume is the logical representation of a NetWare filesystem, which might be a single disk partition be spread across many partitions. By default, the Linux NCPFS support treats volumes as subdirectories of a larger logical filesystem represented by the whole fileserver. The ncpmount command causes each of the NetWare volumes of the mounted fileserver to appear as a subdirectory under the mount point. This is convenient if you want access to the whole server, but for complex technical reasons you will be unable to re-export these directories using NFS, should you wish to do so. We’ll discuss a more complex alternative that works around this problem in a moment.

The ncpmount has a large number of command line options that allow you quite a lot of flexibility in how you manage your NCP mounts. The most important of these are described in Table 15.2.

It is somewhat of a security risk to be putting a password on the command line, as we did with the ncpmount command. Other active, concurrent users could see the password if they happen to be running a program like top or ps. To reduce the risk of others seeing and stealing NetWare login passwords, ncpmount is able to read certain details from a file in a user’s home directory. In this file, the user keeps the login name and password associated with each of the fileservers he or she intends to mount. The file is called ~/.nwclient and it must have permissions of 0600 to ensure that others cannot read it. If the permissions are not correct, the ncpmount command will refuse to use it.

The file has a very simple syntax. Any lines beginning with a # character are treated as comments and ignored. The remainder of the lines have the syntax:

                  fileserver/userid 
                  password

The fileserver is the name of the fileserver supporting the volumes you wish to mount. The userid is the login name of your account on that server. The password field is optional. If it is not supplied, the ncpmount command prompts users for the password when they attempt the mount. If the password field is specified as the - character, no password is used; this is equivalent to the -n command-line argument.

You can supply any number of entries, but the fileserver field must be unique. The first fileserver entry has special significance. The ncpmount command uses the -S command-line argument to determine which of the entries in ~/.nwclient to use. If no server is specified using the -S argument, the first server entry in ~/.nwclient is assumed, and is treated as your preferred server. You should place the fileserver you mount most frequently in the first position in the file.

Let’s look at a more complex ncpmount example involving a number of the features we’ve described. First, let’s build a simple ~/.nwclient file:

# NetWare login details for the Virtual Brewery and Winery
#
# Brewery Login
ALES_F1/MATT staoic1
#
# Winery Login
REDS01/MATT staoic1
#

Make sure its permissions are correct:

$ chmod 600 ~/.nwclient

Let’s mount one volume of the Winery’s server under a subdirectory of a shared directory, specifying the file and directory permissions such that others may share the data from there:

$ ncpmount -S REDS01 -V RESEARCH -f 0664 -d 0775 /usr/share/winery/data/

This command, in combination with the ~/.nwclient file shown, would mount the RESEARCH volume of the REDS01 server onto the /usr/share/winery/data/ directory using the NetWare login ID of MATT and the password retrieved from the ~/.nwclient file. The permissions of the mounted files are 0664 and the directory permissions are 0775.