[K12OSN] Working on Netware home drive mounting utility... Anybody interested?

[Joe Korzeniewski]

Hi Everybody,

For anybody who remembers me (or cares), it's good to be back. I have switched jobs (working for a large metro district now instead of the old middle-of-corn-field one) and talked them into piloting two LTSP labs. We run a netware environment and my boss is adamant about the students being able to access their home directories from the labs. This raised an interesting problem since I have never been able to get NovelClient working on k12ltsp (or anything else... most likely since it was written for FC2 and earlier). Ncpmount is out there and at least works, but there aren't any other front ends for it (at least that I know of). My idea was to create a script that does sort of a contextless login and queries ldap to find the user's fqn and home directory, then conjure up all the other required parameters for ncpmount. I have kind of a proof-of-concept going that we are using successfully in the tech dept (as I try to win converts to linux), but I would like to get it to the point where it would be just a package that can get installed as part of K12LTSP. I have been programming for many years now, but it has been mostly in languages I am not proud of (*cough* ms). I am writing this in python (which has been amazingly easy to pick up) using zenity as a gui but am pretty new to it, so it may be a little rough. It works pretty good with our environment, but like I said, it isn't much right now and isn't very scalable yet, so it needs plenty of work before it is ready to go out for testing. 

So I have two questions: 

Anybody out there want to help? (I am in particular need of guidance in packaging and gui design, although anybody that wants to help in any capacity is welcome)

Will anybody else out there use this if I do GPL and distribute it (basically is it worth spending my free time at home to do so)? 

-Joe

Joe Korzeniewski
Network Administrator
Battle Creek Public Schools
p. 269-965-9667
c. 269-209-9677