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?

novfs ownership woes - NwSetDriveBase2:8804

Something that has really been bugging me is a pest error called NwSetDriveBase2:8804
This error has showed up since SLED10 and persists into SLED10SP1, OpenSUSE 10.3, and OpenSuSE 11 Beta3.

Someone has posted another related issue with this error, but it seems to be unrelated to what I'm facing.
http://forums.novell.com/novell-product-support-forums/open-enterprise-server/oes-platform-independent/oes-client-linux/143685-nwsetdrivebase2-error-mapping-drives.html

I've found two causes to this error. One is an easy fix, the other is the more annoying one...
1) Invalid/Dead symlinks to /var/opt/novell/nclmnt -- when ncl tries to map the drives it sees the file already exists and throws this error. Novell issued a KB on this:
http://www.novell.com/support/viewContent.do?externalId=3810237&sliceId=1

2) Bad ownership on /var/opt/novell/nclmnt -- Example 'ls -la'
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May 7 17:51 .Servers
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 May 7 17:51 .Trees
drwx------ 1 adfdgel root 0 May 21 07:27 adfdgel
drwx------ 1 fdfdard root 0 May 21 09:05 fdfdard
drwx------ 1 dhgfdon root 0 May 21 10:14 dhgfdon
drwx------ 1 nobody root 0 May 12 18:16 ghdfsen
drwx------ 1 root root 0 May 16 08:26 rsiueon
drwx------ 1 nobody root 0 May 19 18:16 tqkher
**usernames mangled for security**

You'll see above that the first 3 users are working correctly. They have ownership of their directories and are logged in. Users 4 and 6 are not logged in, so their folders are owned by nobody. Thats fine. The problem is with user number 5. rsiueon IS logged in, but his directory is owned by root, therefore he cannot map his drives. However, it seems that if this user goes into the .Servers directory, he can see all the shares just fine.

The only way to fix this is by rebooting. We've tried to log the user on and off multiple times, with no success. I'm not sure whats causing this to happen randomly, but its by far our biggest day-to-day issue with the novell client.