Re: Netserver and OS/2 -- MIDRANGE-L

Hello Barry,

(Catching up on e-mail after a week of teaching ...)

You wrote:
>Does anybody know if Netserver at V5R1 will "work" with OS/2 clients. We
>need to map a drive from an OS/2 PC to an 720 running V5R1 and are having
>some problems. We are unsure if OS/2 is still supported at this level for
>NETSERVER.

NetServer does not support OS/2.  A fact I have beaten IBM up about for
ages but I don't have enough clout to make them see sense.  Since your
e-mail address is csc.com and I presume CSC means Computer Sciences
Corporation then you may have enough clout but I won't hold my breath.

A condensed history of the issue (skewed by my recall) for those who may
be interested.

The first release of NetServer occurred at VRM420.  However, they've been
working on it since well before VRM370.  It took them years to get this to
work.

NetServer at VRM420 successfully worked with OS/2.  NetServer support deny
this and say that OS/2 only worked with pre-GA versions of 420.  That is
untrue.  I know of at least one company who used OS/2 to connect to OS/400
420 GA via NetServer.  If you check the APARs at as400service.ibm.com you
will see many PTFs intended to correct flaws in NetServer support for
OS/2.  There are PTFs for file support and printer support and many of
them have dates after the GA date of 420.  You will also see that
eventually the NetServer team found printer support too hard and flagged
it as a permanent restriction.  I have not found any such documented
information for removing OS/2 file support.

NetServer documentation at 420, 430, and 440 showed OS/2 in the list of
supported clients.  When I pointed this out to the NetServer team they got
really pissed off and wanted me to tell them exactly where it was so they
could remove it.  I see that OS/2 has been removed from the list in 450
and later documentation (or at least I can't find it).

Attempting a NET VIEW to NetServer on OS/2 Warp (4.0 and 4.5) gives:

        NET3502: OS/2 error 58 has occurred.
        SYS0058: The specified server cannot perform the requested
operation.

In both cases I can hear the AS/400 respond to the OS/2 request (I hear
disk activity and can see processor activity when nothing is running
except the SMB request).

Tracing the SMB data flow shows that NetServer rejects the connection
attempt with an invalid password response.  It is lying because I know the
password is correct.  I supect the problem is due to different password
encoding at various levels of SMB (but I don't know enough about SMB and
don't have the time available to learn) and that NetServer cannot decode
the password sent by OS/2.  As far as I know the encoding used by OS/2 is
the same as that used by Windoze for Workgroups.  If my suspicion is
correct then NetServer has been deliberately crippled by removing support
for this level.  OS/2 clients can quite happily connect to NT and W2K SMB
servers (and I suspect WXP servers also) so there is nothing wrong with
the OS/2 implementation of SMB per se, the problem is with NetServer.

I can fully understand why the NetServer team want to reduce the number of
supported clients -- they have enough trouble supporting the variances
between the various windoze clients and judging by the huge PTF list for
NetServer, especially in its early releases, they have not been entirely
successful.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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