Novell Client 2.0 after a few days... =(

After my previous post about running Novell Client on SuSe, we upgraded all of our SLED10 users to OpenSUSE with success at first. However this morning someone called me up and said:

"Hey Jakob, Public isn't showing up"

Uh oh. We saw this the second day after implementation, but the user just had the public icon behind another icon. This time I was not so lucky. My first hunch was novfs. Oh man, good guess:

drwxrwxrwx 1 root      root   0 Jul  9 19:10 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root      root 144 May  8  2007 ..
drwxrwxrwx 1 root      root   0 Jul  9 19:10 .Servers
drwxrwxrwx 1 root      root   0 Jul  9 19:10 .Trees
drwxr-xr-x 1 admin     root   0 Jul 15 09:33 admin
drwxr-xr-x 1 ctimmon   root   0 Jul 15 09:28 ctimmon
d????????? ? ?         ?      ?            ? dhson
drwxr-xr-x 1 root      root   0 Jul 14 18:54 djanss
drwxr-xr-x 1 eesrez    root   0 Jul 15 07:43 eesrez
d????????? ? ?         ?      ?            ? esagh
drwxr-xr-x 1 gblte     root   0 Jul 15 09:28 gblte
drwxr-xr-x 1 gdvis     root   0 Jul 14 16:57 gdvis
drwxr-xr-x 1 mbokl     root   0 Jul 15 07:27 mbokl
d????????? ? ?         ?      ?            ? mdrak
drwxr-xr-x 1 mnaemi    root   0 Jul 15 08:16 mnaemi
drwxr-xr-x 1 tbkr      root   0 Jul 15 08:00 tbkr

Wtf? ??? ? ? ?? ? ? there are Q's all over the place, meaning I believe that whatever links user/permissions to the folder has gone away. Digging back to my C experience (which is little and lasted all of one semester at PLU) I figured there is probably a buffer overflow or some max setting that's being hit. When we had our 5 test users, we ran this for 2 weeks without a problem. We put on 19 users, and once we hit that magical number, we start getting very odd problems.

So the quick fix is to only have 15-18 users logged in per machine. For our company, thats okay... for now. But this is a major bug. Who knows what security problems exist within this module.

I opened up a bug on Novell's website: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=409308

My thinking now is that novfs really should become a FUSE module, which could work with the novell client to restore network maps. I'm hoping someone from novell sees these blog posts and helps out.

Am I the only one who runs multiple users per machine?