Article

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by Simon Flood

Problem:

With NetWare 6.5 Support Pack 2 and later it's possible to mount ISO image files of CDs or DVDs as NSS volumes.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could achieve the same thing under OES for Linux!

Solution:

The OES documentation (Comparison of NSS on NetWare and NSS on Linux at http://www.novell.com/documentation/oes/nss_enu/data/bstz14b.html) would appear to suggest that it isn't possible to achieve this but it is!

The trick is to take advantage of Linux's ability to mount an ISO image file via a loopback device:

# mkdir /mnt/<directory>
# mount /<path>/<filename>.iso -o loop /mnt/<directory>

At this point I should say that the ISO image file can even exist on an NSS volume, in which point you'd use:

# mount /media/nss/<volume>/<path>/<filename>.iso -o loop /mnt/<directory>

So now you'll find that if you 'ls /mnt/<directory>' you'll see a directory listing of the root of the ISO image file. Nothing particularly exciting in that and unless you've set up Samba you'll not see it from a workstation.

So now for the magic to make it appear as an NSS volume ... create an NCP volume against the above mount point.

# ncpcon create volume <newvol> /mnt/<directory>

From a workstation you should now be able to map to <server>/<newvol> assuming that you have rights - yes you can grant rights since it's an NSS volume. Now how cool is that!

As with mounting ISO image files under NetWare, all files are set to read-only (though for some unknown reason under Linux they're also flagged as Execute Only).

To dismount the volume use:

# ncpcon remove volume <newvol>
# umount /mnt/<directory>

If you need to mount more than 8 ISO image files see TID 3143620.

Environment:

OES for Linux with NCP Server component installed

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.