Novell filesystem support

[Simeon Pilgrim]

Hello,

I have been making Wine support Novell Bindery calls via the 
ncplib, so that I can get Pegasus mail to do mhs mail. But i've hit 
the brick wall, novell file operations on a window -> unix -> novell 
file system dose not work very well.

So what needs to happen is make Wine know about other file 
system types other than dos / windows / unix. What I was thinking 
is, there must be some system that windows uses to register extra 
file systems and then use supplied functions for read/write/etc 
operations.

Dose Wine also support this system, or should it be made to do 
this? 
If this is in place where in the code should I look for references. If it 
is not supported, is it something that is should be supported in the 
future( i.e. a clean implementation ) or is an ugly little hack ok.

If doing a hack, what structures should I add the extra information 
to, what structures should I not touch.

p.s. sorry if this has been brought up before, I found it hard to 
search the archives.

Regards,
Simeon Pilgrim

-------------------------------------------------------------
Simeon Pilgrim                      27 Nazareth Avenue
System Test Engineer                PO Box 8011
Allied Telesyn Research             Christchurch 8034
(An Allied Telesyn Group company)   New Zealand 
phone [phone]                fax   [phone]       
-------------------------------------------------------------

[Andreas Mohr]

On Mon, Feb 12, 2001 at 12:41:31PM +1200, Simeon Pilgrim wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have been making Wine support Novell Bindery calls via the 
> ncplib, so that I can get Pegasus mail to do mhs mail. But i've hit 
> the brick wall, novell file operations on a window -> unix -> novell 
> file system dose not work very well.

Ah, finally somebody is implementing Novell support.
Many people have been asking this, and I have told them a bit where to find
information about that, but nobody cared to actually implement stuff,
they just went away silently.

Can you tell us what exactly the problem is that you're experiencing ?
I don't know that much about what the problem might be, so you'd
have to explain it...
> So what needs to happen is make Wine know about other file 
> system types other than dos / windows / unix. What I was thinking 
> is, there must be some system that windows uses to register extra 
> file systems and then use supplied functions for read/write/etc 
> operations.

That'd be possible via DOS device drivers.
I don't exactly know where you added support for anything,
but there's a certain Novell VxD that many programs complained about.
> Dose Wine also support this system, or should it be made to do 
> this?

Some work has been done there, but a lot is missing, AFAIK.
> If this is in place where in the code should I look for references. If it 
> is not supported, is it something that is should be supported in the 
> future( i.e. a clean implementation ) or is an ugly little hack ok.

Well, first, I don't know what the problem is, so I can only give rough
answers.
But I'd have a look into files/drive.c and files/ in general.
> If doing a hack, what structures should I add the extra information 
> to, what structures should I not touch.

More information ! ;-)
> p.s. sorry if this has been brought up before, I found it hard to 
> search the archives.

Nobody brought it up this way.
Everybody just searched for answers.

Thanks for doing that !

Andreas Mohr

[Simeon Pilgrim]

> Ah, finally somebody is implementing Novell support.
> Many people have been asking this, and I have told them a bit where to find
> information about that, but nobody cared to actually implement stuff,
> they just went away silently.

At this point its a hack to get bindery support via ipx.
> Can you tell us what exactly the problem is that you're experiencing ?
> I don't know that much about what the problem might be, so you'd
> have to explain it...

Well I have built a dll that Pegasus uses call callwin32.dll, all the 
bindery querys work fine. It's the file create/read/write thats not 
working. I put a bit of code into file.c:CreateFileA so the unc files 
that are on our server get remaped to w:/ files ( where w:/ is a 
ncpmounted novell directory on my linux box ) so that the normal 
dos functions should work. Most things work, ie I can see my mail 
folders but not new mail, ( pegasus email uses single files per new 
mail, and a index/data pair of files for mail folders ). Also when I try 
send email to locate users the mail does not get sent for read/write 
errors. This is because local mail delivery is done by the client 
program, by writting into the users maildir. How this is done is 
under novel you can Create files in directorys that you cannot see(if 
that permisson is greated to you). But you can't do this under unix. 
So the need to implement file i/o for novell files arises.
> That'd be possible via DOS device drivers.
> I don't exactly know where you added support for anything,
> but there's a certain Novell VxD that many programs complained about.

When I first looked I thought that would be the best ( but most 
work) place to add support, but there is little/no documentation 
from novell. So I'm implemented support at the top of the Novell Dll 
hierarchy, because there is lots of novell documentation of how to 
use these functions, and how they work. Which for general use is 
not the best place, but it makes my job easier.

I'll let you understand my problem before trying to answer the rest 
of the questions.

Regards Simeon.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Simeon Pilgrim                      27 Nazareth Avenue
System Test Engineer                PO Box 8011
Allied Telesyn Research             Christchurch 8034
(An Allied Telesyn Group company)   New Zealand 
phone [phone]                fax   [phone]       
-------------------------------------------------------------