OES 2 SP2, Novell FTP (pure-ftpd) problems accessing remote servers / volumes

Novell has identified some problems accessing remote NCP server & volume paths through Novell FTP (pure-ftpd) in OES 2 SP2.  Several fixes have been made in pure-ftpd 1.0.22-0.14.1, which is currently publicly available in the update channel.

 

One of these changes deals with cases where a user name submitted to FTP has upper- or lowercase which is different from the way the user exists in eDirectory.  The user is able to login but is unable to cd //servername/volumename , receiving the error:

 

 

While the above update contains some fixes for this, at least one case sensitivity issue may remain while using OES 2 SP2.  In fact, the known remaining issue involves what might be called "reverse case sensitivity."  If the user name existing in eDir begins with an uppercase character, then remote navigation fails unless the FTP login was done with the user name in all lowercase.

 

In some cases, there are subtle factors which can cause this to begin working, but fail again after certain things are restarted.  So the problem may appear intermittent as well.

Novell testing thus far shows that the remaining known case sensitivity issues are resolved in OES 2 SP3.  If the system is still using SP2 and cannot yet be updated to SP3, the following 2 part solution should be used:

 

1.  Have pure-ftpd 1.0.22-0.14.1 (or newer) installed from the update channel.

 

2.  Edit /etc/nam.conf.  Find and set the line:

convert-lowercase=yes

Then execute:  rcnamcd restart

to put the change into effect.

It may also be helpful to follow that with a cache flush:  namconfig cache_refresh

(This cache is not flushed on a simple restart, because it is normally written to disk during "stop" and then read back during "start".)