[UFO Chicago] Non-IP file sharing?

[Christopher D. Heer]

So I've spent much of yesterday and all of today working on this.  Lots of
things didn't work.  :)  I got IPX configured on Ubuntu, and even got some
ipx utils compiled and running, but I couldn't get it to actually talk SAP
on the wire; my Netware client never saw it.  (And yeah, I checked frame
types and all that.)

NetBEUI went nowhere fast.  It looks like someone had that working with
Samba at one point, but not with any sort of modern kernel that I can
find.

I then looked at running XP on the server as a vm using vmware.  That'd
work -- in the sense that XP would come up and even talk IPX or
NetBEUI...but the vm wouldn't have access to the host filesystem, which
sort of defeats the purpose.  (The common suggestion was to use Samba for
the guest XP to see the host f/s, but that scarcely does me any good!)

So then I figured if I couldn't do it with two machines, I'd do it with
three (real or virtual) -- that is, I'd find some kooky non-Samba/SMB way
to mount the linux drives on a Windows PC, then share them via the Windows
PC.  But amazingly enough, Windows is too smart for that -- it won't
"advertise" a drive that it knows is a networked drive sourced from
somewhere else.  I even got NFS running to see if Windows would "share" an
NFS-mounted drive; no go.

Finally, I hit upon a solution in the oddest of places...Appletalk.  It's
not optimal but it works.

On the linux side, I got netatalk up and running.  I edited
/etc/netatalk/afpd.conf and turned off IP support.  (I don't know if
that's absolutely necessary, but I wanted to force Appletalk use.  I'll
experiment later.)

On the PC side, I tracked down a demo copy of something called PC Maclan. 
Some outfit called Miramar used to sell it, and then it was absorbed by
CA.  It does a whole bunch of crap that I don't care about, but it also
comes with an Appletalk stack and allows XP to talk to Appletalk/AFP
servers.  I configured it to not try and use TCP/IP, then browsed my
"Apple Network" and connected to my linux server, and away I went.  I
fired up my VPN connection and re-tested successfully.

Two caveats, in case anyone tries this.  First, you have to edit
/etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default to specify what to share via AFP.  By
default, it shares home dirs only.  You specify them like so:

     /users          "User Folders"

It's VERY important that name in quotes (which is what will show up in PC
Maclan when you browse) does NOT match a Samba share.  It seems that PC
Maclan works like some kind of shim between AppleTalk/AFP and the Windows
Networking client.  I originally was advertising /users as "Users" -- but
I also have a Samba share called Users.  So when I tried to browse, it
would browse to \\osiris\Users, and it ended up trying to get to the Samba
share.  Once the VPN was connected, it wouldn't work.  I renamed it to
"User Folders" as above and everything was fine.

Second...PC Maclan seems to be discontinued.  And it sure as heck isn't
OSS.  I managed to find a demo, which runs for 3 hrs at a time (it has
other limitations but nothing that affects what I am using it for).  I'm
going to contact CA and see if they'd agree to release it as OSS, or at
least freeware or something, since they don't sell it or anything remotely
like it anymore.  Heck, I haven't even been able to find a used copy.

Oh, and it's slow.  File transfers or file access move along ok, though no
speed records are in danger, but opening directories from XP seems very
sluggish.  It's good enough for what I want to do, but...dang, that was
quite the kludge.
-- 
  Christopher D. Heer -- cheer at heerfamily.net
  http://chrisheer.wordpress.com (blog)