Environment
Novell Open Enterprise Server
Novell NetWare 6.5 Support Pack 6
Situation
When connecting to a NetWare 6.5 server via SFTP, users are
typically put in their home directory on an NCP volume anywhere in
the tree, regardless of which NCP server it resides on. This
is often referred to as "remote server access" or "remote volume
access."
Cases have been seen where some NetWare cluster servers and
volumes can be reached, or some OES Linux NCP volumes cannot be
reached.
In some cases, it was noted
that sys:etc/ssh/logs/sftp-server.log files shows a number of
successful nw_sftp_stat procedures, and a number of failures as
well. All the failures were dealing with server names in
lowercase and all the successes were dealing with uppercase.
Resolution
More than one issue can be involved:
1. For SFTP to reach OES Linux servers with NCP volumes
(including NSS volumes) it is important to keep the OES Linux
system up to date on OES channel patches. Specifically, a
recent NCP patch known as patch-11527, released in June 2007, is required for this type of access to work.
2. Investigation showed that some Server Objects in
eDirectory existed with lowercase names. Or in the case of
clustering, this may be the Virtual Server Object rather thant he
node's server object.
Server object names in eDir have traditionally been all
uppercase, but some more recent utilities allow them to be created
in lowercase. For example, the iManager cluster setup wizard
allows this, as does the OES Linux install. NetWare SFTP has
a bug which causes trouble with lowercase server object
names.
A fix for NetWare SFTP has been made and is included in
NetWare 6.5 SP7.
Short of applying SP7, one possible work-around is to rename
the server object to uppercase (without changing any other
aspect of the name). Most utilities will not rename a server
object, but one that will is the "Gawor LDAP browser". See https://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/13765.html for
information on that browser.
Care should be exercised to watch for any side effects that
come of renaming the server object. If other problems are
caused, the server object name should be returned to its original
name. In Novell's testing, no problems were
encountered. However, the tests did not include a broad range
of Novell products and activities.
Another option would be to reinstall the server, making sure
to specify server name in uppercase whenever prompted.