Linux Network Administrator Guide, Second Edition

The ncpmount Command in Detail

The ncpmount has a large number of command line options that allow you quite a lot of flexibility in how you manage your NCP mounts. The most important of these are described in Table 15.2.

Table 15.2: ncpmount Command Arguments

Argument	Description
- S server	The name of the fileserver to mount.
- U user_name	The NetWare user ID to use when logging in to the fileserver.
- P password	The password to use for the NetWare login.
- n	This option must be used for NetWare logins that don't have a password associated with them.
- C	This argument disables automatic conversion of passwords to uppercase.
- c client_name	This option allows you to specify who owns the connection to the fileserver. This is useful for NetWare printing, which we will discuss in more detail later.
- u uid	The Linux user ID that should be shown as the owner of files in the mounted directory. If this is not specified, it defaults to the user ID of the user who invokes the ncpmount command.
- g gid	The Linux group ID that should be shown as the owner of files in the mounted directory. If this is not specified, it will default to the group ID of the user who invokes the ncpmount command.
- f file_mode	This option allows you to specify the file mode (permissions) that files in the mounted directory should have. The value should be specified in octal, e.g., 0664. The permissions that you will actually have are the file mode permissions specified with this option masked with the permissions that your NetWare login ID has for the files on the fileserver. You must have rights on the server and rights specified by this option in order to access a file. The default value is derived from the current umask.
- d dir_mode	This option allows you to specify the directory permissions in the mounted directory. It behaves in the same way as the -f option, except that the default permissions are derived from the current umask. Execute permissions are granted where read access is granted.
- V volume	This option allows you to specify the name of a single NetWare volume to mount under the mount point, rather than mounting all volumes of the target server. This option is necessary if you wish to re-export a mounted NetWare volume using NFS.
- t time_out	This option allows you to specify the time that the NCPFS client will wait for a response from a server. The default value is 60mS and the timeout is specified in hundredths of a second. If you experience any stability problems with NCP mounts, you should try increasing this value.
- r retry_count	The NCP client code attempts to resend datagrams to the server a number of times before deciding the connection is dead. This option allows you to change the retry count from the default of 5.

Hiding Your NetWare Login Password

It is somewhat of a security risk to be putting a password on the command line, as we did with the ncpmount command. Other active, concurrent users could see the password if they happen to be running a program like top or ps. To reduce the risk of others seeing and stealing NetWare login passwords, ncpmount is able to read certain details from a file in a user's home directory. In this file, the user keeps the login name and password associated with each of the fileservers he or she intends to mount. The file is called ~/.nwclient and it must have permissions of 0600 to ensure that others cannot read it. If the permissions are not correct, the ncpmount command will refuse to use it.

The file has a very simple syntax. Any lines beginning with a # character are treated as comments and ignored. The remainder of the lines have the syntax:

fileserver/userid