NFS Client - LAN Workplace 5.0 for DOS/Windows
An NFS client for DOS! It includes windows support too so you can map network drives using a nice GUI as well as by using commands like net register (login) and net link (map drive). This one is licensed from Beame & Whiteside rather than built by Novell. Beame & Whitesite Software was acquired by Hummingbird in March 1995 shortly before LAN WorkPlace 5 came out.
Getting this going was a bit of a mission - primarily because I insisted on not reading the manual at first. I kept getting authorization errors no matter what I pointed it at (linux and the NetWare NFS server both didn't work). I tried using NIS too but that didn't fix it. It turns out that this and most (all?) other PC based NFS clients from the early 90s required an Authentication Server running somewhere. This thing verifies a username and password returning a uid, gid and other things the NFS client needs.
LAN WorkPlace comes with two authentication servers in both source and binary form, lwpnfsd and bwnfsd. I'm not sure what the difference is but bwnfsd is from the people who actually wrote the NFS Client and I expect lwpnfsd is just a lightly customised version of it. The binaries are of course not particularly useful today unless you've got a mid-90s unix box to run them on. I was able to get bwnfsd to compile and run on a modern linux system but it didn't seem to work properly (access denied on the client) so possibly Linux has changed too much since 1995 for bwnfsd to correctly validate passwords.
Luckily, Beame & Whiteside didn't reinvent the wheel here - the protocol bwnfsd uses is identical to the one used by Suns PC-NFS product and so Suns pcnfsd works fine. No modern Linux distro seems to include pcnfsd but NetBSD still does! On a NetBSD 9.2 box that was already setup as an NFS server all I had to do was run rpc.pcnfsd and set the NetBSD box as the Authentication Server then everything worked fine!
Screenshots
The NFS Server requires a driver (loaded from config.sys) plus a pair of TSRs. So to make it work you've got to enable it from the configuration tool. An authentication server is also required (one of: pcnfsd, bwnfsd, lwpnfsd). Source is available for all three but these things are pretty ancient so using NetBSD (which includes pcnfsd by default) is by far the easiest option
Because it uses quite a bit of conventional memory you'll be asked on startup if you want to load the two TSRs.
LWPRPC and LWPNFS
Which together take up 37K of conventional memory! ETHDEV, the component loaded from config.sys, brings the total up to 49K.
When windows starts you get this nice login box. Obviously Novell didn't build this NFS client. You'll need to use a username and password that is valid for whatever unix box the Authentication Server is running on.
The NFS Client. This is really just a convenient GUI for mapping drives - you can do everything from DOS using net commands too.
Main Window
The Register button gets you the login screen.
And the Setup button gets you the Network Setup window. The NetWare button here just launches the regular NetWare tools utility.
Connect a network drive!
The Browse button lets you browse for an NFS export to mount. The hosts list is by default just populated with whats in your local hosts file.
If you put in the IP of something you'll get all its exports.
The format of the network path is a bit odd: \\ip-address-or-host\/export/name. To map the drive you just click Connect!
Done! The form has automatically cleared and moved on to the next available drive letter in case you want to map more.
One drive mapped to an NFS export! Oddly, the IP address shown is that of my authentication sever, not the NFS server. Seems like a bug to me.
The disconnect button gets you this - a list of mapped NFS drives so you can pick which one to disconnect.
The protection button gets you this.
And the group button this.
It works! I can browse ftp.zx.net.nz via a drive letter! The way it converts long filenames to 8.3 makes it a little bit less useful though.
Mapped drives remain connected when you exit windows too - the GUI is nothing more than a convenient front-end to the real-mode NFS client. Everything it does you can do from DOS too.
Disclaimer & Comments
I'm not a netware expert, don't have any of those fancy novell certifications and have never administred a netware network; I've just played with it at home occasionally since 2004 or so. Email me if you've got any suggestsions or corrections for this page or any extra information you think is worth including here. My address is david at this websites domain name (without the www bit of course).