CentOS - Jul 2005 - Netware server emulation on Linux

One of our group companies has just 'gone live' on a new laboratory
management package. Although the software is M$-based (ie: expects a M$
server at the heart of it), it is running with its core database on a
CentOS3 server using Samba for client access - in fact, the developers are
amazed at the performance and say it beats a Win2K/2K3 server 'hands
down'!!!

Anyway, the old lab management app that I inherited has its database hosted
on a Netware 3.12 server and the client app is written in Turbo Pascal
including database units compiled with a specific Netware switch and if we
try to run the db off the Linux server using Samba we get record lock
errors. Unfortuntely, we have no confidence in re-compiling the ancient
source code, expecially since the company that developed the database engine
is long gone. We need access to the old data for reference and although I am
going to attempt to extract it all and do some PHP stuff with it, a Google
search turns up two netware emulation packages for Linux - lwared and
mars_nwe - so my question is this: has anyone around these here parts used
any or both of these apps with CentOS 3 or 4 and if so can I have any useful
insight? I suppose the ultimate test would be to try them both but a head
start would be aprpeciated.

Thanks as ever,

Nigel Kendrick

On Wed, 2005-07-06 at 22:16 +0100, Nigel kendrick wrote:
> search turns up two netware emulation packages for Linux - lwared and
> mars_nwe - so my question is this: has anyone around these here parts used
> any or both of these apps with CentOS 3 or 4 and if so can I have any
useful
> insight? I suppose the ultimate test would be to try them both but a head
> start would be aprpeciated.
I have used mars_nwe under Whitebox 3 (using the kernel-unsuppoted
package) ... it works, but is not maintained, requires IPX (not
supported under CentOS 4 without custom kernel) and the DOS NW admin
tools.  If you have a NW 3.12 server you should have the DOS management
tools to get it working.

It's not terribly hard to get working with plenty of comments in the
config file.  We were going to use it to replace a DOS networking
solution we were using after SAMBA and MS-CLIENT had stability problems
but ended up scrapping both and keeping with what we were using (better
the devil you know).

Regards,
Paul


> 
> Thanks as ever,
> 
> Nigel Kendrick
> 
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>