Troubleshooting Win2K and NetWare Interoperability

I have received a lot of letters from readers who've been through corporate mergers involving one company buying another. In many of these situations, the administrators are asked to make two totally dissimilar networks work seamlessly together. In this article, I'll address some of the problems that you might encounter when trying to make a Microsoft Windows 2000 network interoperate with a Novell NetWare network.

There are several different ways to join NetWare and Windows networks. The most popular solution by far is Microsoft's Gateway (and Client) Services for NetWare (GSNW) because it comes free with Windows, and because you can attach thousands of Windows users and only use one NetWare client access license. (Novell offers a similar product that makes a Windows server appear as if it were a NetWare server.)

For the purposes of this article, we will assume that you're using GSNW and the associated client, and that your goal is to be able to share file and print resources across the two networks. We will further assume that you've used Gateway (and Client) Services for NetWare to join the two networks, and that you've been able to establish at least some level of communications between them. However, even after basic communications have been established, there are still lots of problems that can prevent users from seamlessly accessing both networks, and we will address those specifically.

One of the most frequent problems is when the two networks are functioning well, and suddenly Windows users stop being able to access the NetWare servers. There are a number of things that can cause this. The nature of GSNW is to use a single Windows user account for all Windows clients to access NetWare resources. Therefore, this makes for a single point of failure and means that the first place that you should look is the gateway account itself.

Make Sure GSNW Is Logged In
If communications were partially or fully functional at one point, then something has to have happened to have caused them to cease. If none of the servers in question have been rebooted recently, the problem could be that login time restrictions were accidentally placed on the gateway account, and the gateway account was forced to log out. It's also possible that another administrator could have inadvertently disconnected the gateway account from the Netware server or even accidentally deleted the gateway account. These situations may seem far-fetched, but I've seen them happen and they're worth looking into.

Alternatively, the gateway account's password may have expired, or the gateway account may have been accidentally removed from the NTGATEWAY group on the NetWare server. There's also another cause that tends to be a bit more elusive: As a Windows administrator, it's easy to get used to the Per Seat method of licensing in which the server simply assumes that each client has a valid client access license. However, NetWare's license is based on how many users are concurrently logged in. If all of the NetWare server's licenses are in use when the gateway account tries to login, none of the Windows clients will be able to access the NetWare server through the gateway.