Chapter 10. Migrating Netware Server to Samba-3

Novell is a company any seasoned IT manager has to admire. It has become increasingly Linux-friendly and is emerging out of a deep regression that almost saw the company disappear into obscurity. Novell's SUSE Linux hosts the NetWare server and it is the platform of choice to which many older NetWare servers are being migrated. It will be interesting to see what becomes of NetWare over time. Meanwhile, there can be no denying that Novell is a Linux company.

Whatever flavor of Linux is preferred in your environment, whether Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, or SUSE (Novell), the information in this chapter should be read with the knowledge that file locations may vary a little; even so, the information in this chapter should provide something of value.

Contributions to this chapter were made by Misty Stanley-Jones, a UNIX administrator of many years who surfaced on the Samba mailing list with a barrage of questions and who regularly helps other administrators to solve thorny Samba migration questions.

One wonders how many NetWare servers remain in active service. Many are being migrated to Samba on Linux. Red Hat Linux, SUSE Linux 9.x, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 are ideal target platforms to which a NetWare server may be migrated. The migration method of choice is much dependent on the tools that the administrator finds most natural to use. The old-hand NetWare guru will likely want to use tools like the NetWare NLM for rsync to migrate files from the NetWare server to the Samba server. The UNIX administrator might prefer tools that are part of the Mars_NWE (Martin Stovers' NetWare Emulator) open source package. The MS Windows network administrator will likely make use of the NWConv utility that is a part of Windows NT4 Server. Whatever your tool of choice, migration will be filled with joyous and challenging moments though probably not concurrently.

The priority that Misty faced was one of migration of the data files off the NetWare 4.11 server and onto a Samba-based Windows file and print server. This chapter does not pretend to document all the different methods that could be used to migrate user and group accounts off a NetWare server. Its focus is on migration of data files.

This chapter tells its own story, so ride along. Maybe the information presented here will help to smooth over a similar migration challenge in your favorite networking environment.

File paths have been modified to permit use of RPM packages provided by Novell. In the original documentation contributed by Misty, the Courier-IMAP package had been built directly from the original source tarball.