PC Unix and 3Com and Novell networks

[Rich Braun]

bob at reed.UUCP (Bob Ankeney) writes:
>  A few questions from a neophyte network person:
>
>1) Is there any problem running NFS using the 3Com cards or will we need
>   some other card?  (We plan on giving the 3Com server a decent burial).

3Com is the most popular LAN card.  Drivers are available from many sources,
including the board vendors and TCP/IP and/or Novell network vendors.  The
3C523 is not yet universally supported, but the 3C501/3C503/3C505 are.

>2) From Unix, can we access the MSDOS files on the novell network?  What
>   would be involved?

I've been working on that problem myself.  The answer is "sort of", for
the time being.  You can either wait until TCP/IP and NFS from Novell are
no longer vaporware (Q3 of '91, at the earliest), or you can use the
public-domain solution I've come up with:  get the Brigham-Young packet
drivers, CMU PC/IP, and Stan's Own Server.  This is all available on
sun.soe.clarkson.edu via anonymous FTP.  However, I've encountered some
bugs, and as of today I've fixed four bugs in the SOS source code.  Stan
no longer supports the code himself so I'm taking on the task.  I'll make
my modifications available to anyone else who has this same desire to
mount Novell servers from the Unix client.  Note that this solution
requires a spare PC and probably won't perform particularly well compared
with Novell's TCP/IP when it becomes available.  Fortunately, it doesn't
cost anything.

>3) From the novell network can we access Unix files?

You can buy Portable Netware from Interactive Systems to accomplish this.
Or you can bring up TCP/IP on your DOS systems and use 'ftp' for file
transfers to/from Unix, and put PC-NFS from Sun on top of that.

Indeed, I'd prefer this myself:  yank all the disks off the Novell servers,
put them on Unix servers, bring up TCP/IP on all the DOS systems, and
do away with Netware entirely:  performance and reliability would be
better.  But, that can only be done if the Unix systems can provide the
same level of software support for DOS users that the Novell network
provides.  At my company, that is not the case, at least for the time being.

-rich