NOVACS

In my American High School, I had to put some Macs on the Novell network. Officially, this is not a problem, but all the schools in the county having tried it before had reported problems. In order to separate the Macs from the rest of the network, I set up a Linux-server as a gateway for the Mac lab. However, next to being able to surf the internet, the sysop also wanted the users to be able to access their regular Novell folders, but still keep the Macs from directly accessing the Novell servers.
The solution: The gateway provides a web-page where users can enter their Novell username and password. This information is passed on to a perl-script which in turn uses it to mount the Novell folder via 'novellmount' into a dummy folder. Then, a symbolic link is created in the /home-folder of the specific user which can be accessed via Appletalk or SMB. The perl scripts written for this purpose form NOVell for mACS.