How to Access the Netware Volumes on your Mac

...at Drew!

Thanks to the new version of the Netware software, Macintosh computers are now able to directly access NetWare volumes at Drew. Here's how to set up for the current situation.

Doing It

Requirements

A Mac
System 8.0 or higher (if you have 8, get at least 8.1; if you have 9, get 9.2.2)
All the usual network software (which you probably have if you've been using your Mac on the internet from Drew already)
Confine filenames to 31 characters or fewer (this is an AppleShare limitation)
Make sure your Netware password has 8 characters, no more, no less (AppleShare's maximum, Netware's minimum)
Be on campus. (No off-campus access yet, but I'll keep you posted.) For off-campus access via FTP, just go here.

OS X

No pretty screenshots to look at here, but the verbal directions alone should be clear enough. This is really very simple. In the Finder, choose "Connect to server..." from the "Go" menu. Then enter any one of the three following server names in there (different volumes may one day be on different servers):
- afp://causeway-o.drew.edu/
- afp://causeway-u.drew.edu/
- afp://causeway-p.drew.edu/
You'll be prompted for your username and password, and you're off. Add the volumes to your Favorites folder (drag them onto the heart in the toolbar of any window) or make them Login items via the Preference Pane, and then you'll have easy access to them whenever you like. I find that I can't simply double-click on the alias to mount the volume, but the alias does make it easier to get to a specific folder once I have the volume mounted, especially for my User folder, which is one of over a thousand on that volume. A way to easily get to the volumes is to open up TextEdit and type in the URL, then drag that text to the Desktop. The Finder will recognize that it's an internet address and create a double-clickable file that will open up the server.
Also see the note below on filename extensions.

OS 9

If you installed the old client, get rid of it by either going to the Extensions Manager control panel where you can revert to your old non-Netware set or by simply uncheck the Netware items (they're obviously named), or by going directly into your control panel and extensions folders and deleting the appriate items (still obviously named).
Mounting the Volumes
1. Go to the Chooser (under the Apple menu). It should look something like this:
2. Select the AppleShare icon (on the left in the image). Depending on where you are on campus a number of machine names will appear in the box on the right, along with a button.
3. Click that "Server IP Address..." button on the right.
4. Enter one of the three server names given above into the dialogue box that appears; it doesn't matter which.
5. A new dialogue appears asking for your username and password. The default name is the name your Mac is set-up for. This is probably not your username on the Drew system (mine is "john", as you can see in the image), so you'll have to change it. Just type in the correct value for it and your password, and hit enter or click on the big "Connect" button.
6. The final dialogue box asks you which volumes you want to mount. Take your pick, the names are pretty obvious. If you want a volume to mount whenever you start up your computer, check the little box next to its name. (If you have a laptop and you start-up off-campus with some regularity, you may find that the delay in starting up as the computer searches for these inaccessible volumes is too long to bear. YMMV, as they say.)
7. Close the chooser. You should now have as many volumes mounted on your desktop as you chose in the last step.
8. As of early July 2002, mac users with OS 9 cannot delete files from the netware servers, though they can do everything else (as far as I can tell).

Choosing a Printer

Hmmm, I forgot to ask about this. More later when I find out.

Making Life Easier

We need to do a few things to make using the system easier.
First set up some aliases to make it easy to open my folders directly. This saves some time since the client doesn't mount only your folder, but the whole server directory.

Find the folder on the server that you want to access quickly.
Make an alias to it ("Make Alias" from the file menu, or command-M, or option-command-drag the icon to your desktop).
Move the alias where you want it. I put mine in a "Drew machines" folder in my Apple Menu.

There are two other ways to use aliases here (there's always another way to do it):

Your Recent Servers folder in your Apple menu will also have these servers listed, and unless you frequently mount others, they'll stay in there forever. (If you don't have this item in your Apple menu, open the Apple menu control panel and check the appropriate box.) You can also move or copy these aliases to another, more convenient location.
Alternatively, control-click on one of the server icons and add it to your favorites.

Usage

Many of the icons will apparently appear generic (that blank look) until you edit them on your Mac. Then they'll take on their appropriate application-dependent appearance. Here's what my user www folder window looked like when I first viewed it on my Mac.

Icons in a window

Note that all of the file icons have extensions (those three- or four-letter suffixes). If the file is not assigned to an application already (and then it will have an icon indicating that), your Mac will open those files by reading the extension and using the application that has been assigned to that extension via, in OS 8.6 and later, the internet control panel. If it doesn't know the extension, it'll ask you what application to use. This should be true for files without extensions, though since Windows doesn't like them, you won't find too many.

Remeber that if you want these files to open up easily on the Windows side, you should use these extensions yourself. Unlike the MacOS, Windows doesn't know what to do with files without extensions. So if you intend to have your students or colleagues use these files, put those annoying things on there.

Also remember that the reason we have to go through this whole special process is that Mac files have two parts, or forks, a resource and a data fork. Windows (and UNIX and pretty much everything else) has only one part, equivalent to the data fork. Files of most common file types (e.g., Word, WordPerfect, html, pdf, any image format) don't store any info that Windows needs in the resource fork, so that accessing them from the Windows side shouldn't cause problems (though the resource fork will likely be destroyed and you may lose the special icon - I've done only minimal testing of this). Note that text files made on one platform may have funny line-endings (if any) on the other. This happens with UNIX files too, so it's not just a mac or Windows thing. Finally don't forget that Windows can have filenames of up to 255 characters, while AppleShare supports only 31 (OS X supports as many as Windows; it's a Unicode thing, if you're interested). Your OS 9 Mac will therefore truncate the extra-long filenames (these are rare), so be careful of this and keep your names short-ish. (Yes, the situation is ironic, because Macs supported 31-char filenames since their inception in 1984 while DOS and Windows users were long limited to the 8.3 naming system.)

Problems?

I haven't used this at all beyond getting it set up, so let me know if you have any new problems.