How to bulk-create CIFS (Samba) shares on NetWare.

Customer needed to create a large number of CIFS shares on NetWare servers. Here are some methods for speeding-up the process rather than creating each one manually.

The shares are attributes of the server object, and can be created at the console of the respective server which means that they can be "imported" by means of an .NCF file with the following format:

cifs share add 'volume:\path''sharename' connection_limit 'comment'

e.g.:
cifs share add 'data:\home\pthompson''pthompson' 0 'pauls_home_dir'
cifs share add 'data:\home\fbloggs''fred' 0'freds_home_dir'

It's best to create the first one manually (via iManager) so you get the correct context, etc, set.

One can view shares from the server console with the "cifs share" command, or get information about specific shares with:

cifs share "

Another way to create the shares en-masse is to import them from an LDIF file with the following format:

dn: cn=SERVER1,o=novell
changetype: modify
replace: nfapCIFSShares
nfapCIFSShares: 'data:\home\pthompson''pthompson' 0
'pauls_home_dir'$'data:\home\pthompson''pthompson' 0
'freds_home_dir'$'data:\home\fred''fred' 0'freds_home_dir'

Again, it would be best to create the first one manually to get the right context, etc set up. One can use ICE (Novell Import Convert Export utility) with the following syntax:

ice ‑ -D LDAP ‑ -s147.2.43.152 ‑ -d CN=admin,O=novell ‑ -w password ‑ -S LDIF ‑ -f ./shares.ldif

Don't use more than 12 characters for the sharenames, or users won't be able to browse them. If that's insufficient to give a meaningful name, make use of the comment field.