%global_entities; ]> Novell is a company any seasoned IT manager has to admire. Since the acquisition of the SuSE Linux company, the acquisition on Ximian, and other moves that are friendly to the FLOSS (Free-Libre/Open Source Software) movement, Novell are emerging out of a deep regression that almost saw the company disappear into obscurity. This chapter was contributed by Kristal Sarbanes, a UNIX administrator of many years who surfaced on the Samba mailing list with a barrage of questions, and who regularly now 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. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 is an ideal target platform to which a NetWare server may be migrated. The migration method of choice is much dependant on the tools that the administrator finds most natural to use. The old-hand NetWare guru will likely want to use the tools that are part of the Mars_NWE (Martin Stovers NetWare Emulator) open source package. The MS Windows administrator will likely make use of the NWConv utility that is a part of Windows NT4 Server, while the die-hard UNIX administrator will have a natural inclination to use the NetWare NLM for rsync to migrate files from the NetWare server to the Samba server. Whatever your tool of choice, migration will be filled with joyous and challenging moments - though probably not concurrently. This chapter tells its own story, so ride along, ... maybe the information here presented will help to smooth over a similar migration that may be required in your favorite networking environment. Kristal Sarbanes was recruited by Abmas Inc. to administer a network that had not received much attention for some years and was much in need of a make-over. As a brand-new sysadmin to this company, she inherited a very old Novell file server, and came with a determination to change things for the better. A site survey turned up the following details for the old NetWare server: 200 MHz MMX processor 512K RAM 24 GB disk space in RAID1 Novell 4.11 patched to service pack 7 60+ users 7 network-attached printers The company had outgrown this server several years ago and were dealing with severe growing pains. Some of the problems experienced were: Very slow performance Available storage hovering around the 5% range. Extremely slow print spooling. Users storing information on their local hard drives, causing backup integrity problems. At one point disk space had filled up to 100% causing the payroll database to become corrupt. This caused the accounting department to be down for over a week and necessitated deployment of another file server. The replacement server was created with very poor security and design considerations from a discarded desktop PC. Kristal tells her own story in the following words: After presenting a cost-benefit report to management, as well as an estimated cost and time-to-completion, approval was given procede with the solution proposed. The server was built from purchased components. The total expense was $3000. A brief description of the configuration follows: 3.0 GHz P4 Processor 1 GB RAM 120 GB SATA operating system drive 4 x 80 GB SATA data drives configured in a RAID5 array to give a total of about 240 GB usable space 2 x 80 GB SATA removable drives for online backup A DLT drive for asynchronous offline backup SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 A decision to use LDAP was made even though I know nothing about LDAP except that I had been reading the book LDAP System Administration, by Gerald Carter. LDAP seemed to provide some of the functionality of Novell's e-Directory Services and would provide centralized authentication and identity management. Building the LDAP database took a while, and a lot of trial and error. Following LDAP System Administration's guidance, I installed OpenLDAP (from RPM later I compiled a more current version from source) and built my initial LDAP tree. The very first challenge was to create a company white-pages, followed by manually entering everything from the printed company diretory. This used only the inetOrgPerson objectclass from the OpenLDAP schemas. The next step was to write a shell script which would look at the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files on our mail server, and create a LDIF file from which the information could be imported into LDAP. This would allow use of LDAP for Linux authentication, IMAP, POP3, and SMTP.