We have a lot of customers with Novell file servers, and being able to access their home directory, as well as other shared directories, is a number one requirement. So, it would be great if RHEL could support ncpfs. This includes building the kernel with ncpfs support as well as shipping the "ncpfs" tools (such as ncpmount). As a side note, Novells own client (http://www.novell.com/products/clients/linux/overview.html) is only supported on (a few of) Novells own distributions. As far as I understand, it does not work on RHEL, and it isn't open source. ncpfs is fairly stable. It's included in Fedora and most other distributions. We have customers running 50 or so concurrent user sessions per server. Each user has several NCP mounts, so hundreds of mounts per server is not uncommon. We have detected one problem, though: http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/1/4/92, but we have also provided a fix for this problem, which will be included in the next kernel release. So: Can ncpfs be included in future RHEL versions or updates?
In our enviroment we have rhel client 5 as desktop and building custom kernels and managing updates for theese is not what we had expected when we choose Red Hat as distribution for our enviroment. So please consider including support for ncp and ncpfs in future rhel updates.
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion, but this component is not scheduled to be updated in the current Red Hat Enterprise Linux release. If you would like this request to be reviewed for the next minor release, ask your support representative to set the next rhel-x.y flag to "?".
There are no plans to support ncpfs in RHEL.