OS/2 protocols for NAS

[john...@nospam.com.au]

Does OS/2 include protocols required for reading and writing files to any
Network Attached Storage device?

[Grant Taylor]

On 09/24/2018 03:08 PM, john...@nospam.com.au wrote:
> Does OS/2 include protocols required for reading and writing files to
> any Network Attached Storage device?

OS/2 should be able to talk to a NAS that speaks (some version of) SMB.



--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

[Marcel Mueller]

Am 24.09.2018 um 23:08 schrieb john...@nospam.com.au:
> Does OS/2 include protocols required for reading and writing files to any
> Network Attached Storage device?

It depends.

Basically there are two options:

#1 Use Samba for OS/2.
This is sufficiently recent to connect to almost any server using the
CIFS protocol. While this works flawlessly it requires a license for
NetDrive (or newer eCS).

#2 Tweak the samba server to accept OS/2 Lanman 2 protocol, used by the
standard IBM Peer Requester. This Requires Warp Connect or newer and
*all* available network Fixpacks applied.
There are several security relevant changes to be made to the server for
LANMAN2 to work, mainly:
obey pam restrictions = Yes
lanman auth = Yes
ntlm auth = yes
raw NTLMv2 auth = no
lm announce = yes
min protocol = LANMAN2
You should also know that usernames are always uppercase in LANMAN2.
You can compensate for that by a mapping file:
username map = /etc/samba/users.map
The file should contain entries like
yourname = YOURNAME
Of course the username and password of IBM Peer (local logon) and the
Server should match.
This solution still works with recent Samba 4.8. BTDT recently.

Both methods work without any further problems. But the second version
has the drawback that the servers security need to be weakened
significantly. This has no direct impact on other recent clients, but
clients /could/ connect without up-to-date security, and, of course, IBM
Peer will do so. So be sure to have a private network.

Most likely for reasonable EA support you might want the following
server config, independent of th above solution:
ea support = Yes
map archive = No
mangled names = No
store dos attributes = Yes
But the underlying file system of the server must support EAs as well.
This is not that uncommon for NAS devices since they all have Linux. But
many Linux file systems restrict EA size to 4kB which is not sufficient
for all OS/2 operations (it requires 64kB). So I recommend to use XFS as
server file system which does not have this kind of restrictions and it
is supported by default by the Linux kernel.


Marcel

[Grant Taylor]

Well articulated and detailed response Marcel.

On 09/25/2018 12:47 PM, Marcel Mueller wrote:
> Both methods work without any further problems. But the second version
> has the drawback that the servers security need to be weakened
> significantly. This has no direct impact on other recent clients, but
> clients /could/ connect without up-to-date security, and, of course, IBM
> Peer will do so. So be sure to have a private network.

Do you have any thoughts, or knee jerk reactions, to having OS/2 connect
to the NAS over NetBIOS instead of TCP/IP? It might be possible to
segregate older less secure clients to NetBIOS on the LAN.

[Marcel Mueller]

Am 25.09.2018 um 22:49 schrieb Grant Taylor:
> Do you have any thoughts, or knee jerk reactions, to having OS/2 connect
> to the NAS over NetBIOS instead of TCP/IP?

This is probably impossible since you will not find even one NAS device
that supports NETBEUI.
Samba never supported it, so any Linux based solution is out. Microsoft
finally dropped Netbios with WinXP/W2k3 (although the NT4 driver still
works when manually installed) and there is probably no existing NAS
that uses OS/2 WarpServer. ;-)

> It might be possible to
> segregate older less secure clients to NetBIOS on the LAN.

A firewall would do the same job even better.

Furthermore there are a few tricks at lower level to separate devices in
a network. E.g. you might use 192.168.1.0/25 for your ordinary LAN
devices. The OS/2 client could use 192.168.1.128/25, impossible to
communicate with the others at TCP level. And the only server that
should communicate with OS/2 gets 192.168.1.0/24 which includes both
networks. You only have to take care of the broadcast address.


Marcel

[john...@nospam.com.au]

Many thanks for your response. You have given me confidence to look further at
NAS.

[Paul Smedley]

Hi All,

On 26/09/18 04:17, Marcel Mueller wrote:
> Am 24.09.2018 um 23:08 schrieb john...@nospam.com.au:
>> Does OS/2 include protocols required for reading and writing files to any
>> Network Attached Storage device?
>
> It depends.
>
> Basically there are two options:
>
> #1 Use Samba for OS/2.
> This is sufficiently recent to connect to almost any server using the
> CIFS protocol. While this works flawlessly it requires a license for
> NetDrive (or newer eCS).

Note that this isn't quite true. Netdrive allows free use of ndpsmb.dll
(the Samba plugin).

Cheers,

Paul

[wbstc...@gmail.com]

WinXP *does* support the NETBEUI protocol layer, you just have to dig it out of the Extras folder on the Installation CD. I use it on my home LAN, which incorporates OS/2 servers, Win 7 Pro clients/servers and WinXP client/servers, plus a Buffalo NAS server.