My workplace is devoutly Novell; in fact, I was the only one there who really was into Linux at all until Novell started pushing Suse. Now, everyone's on about Linux. Well, almost everyone; our network admin has yet to soften in his dislike of all things Linux, so we still run mostly Netware 6.5 with NCP shares and NDS and all that good old stuff.

Having become the "linux guy", who got pulled in whenever we needed a simple and free server put together, I've been putting debian out there because I felt it was the best for the job. But now, of course, the long-time Novell folks are stoked about Suse, and I just can't get into it, but the need has begun to arise to get my Debian servers talking to their Netware servers. Novell has released a "client for linux", which irks me a bit because it should be called "client for Suse" as it doesn't work with anything else. I tried installing it using alien (got Groupwise and ConsoleOne going that way), but it's apparently far to complex to do with alien, I think it even patches the kernel somewhat.

I have used ncpmount in the past, but it's kind of a pain to get working, seems to run horridly slow, and doesn't always stay connected for more than an hour or two if left idle.

All that to say, has anyone out there got extensive experience integrating Debian into a Novell network, and how have you done it?