A.P. Lawrence

Visionfs

When the SCO operating sytems were sold to Caldera, Visionfs remained owned by Tarantella (the company that was SCO). Therefore, Visionfs is no longer a free product. I recommend using Samba instead. And I'd recommend using it on Linux, not SCO.

Visionfs puts your SCO box into the Network Neighborhood of your Windows machines. This lets your Windows users use the SCO machine for file space and also gives them access to Unix printers. Nothing needs to be installed on the Windows machines; it's all on the server.

Visionfs is included with both Unixware 7 and Openserver. With Unixware, it installs automatically; Openserver 5.0.4 and 5.0.5 (3.2v5.0.4/5) require a separate install.

I'm already installed and licensed, skip to configuration.

Do you have the latest version?

Download the latest version of Visionfs from Sco's Vision Site. Don't be confused by the references to 30 day evaluation; Visionfs is included in current releases of Openserver and Unixware. The "eval" you download will not be limited to 30 days.

The latest version includes support for the Unix machine being an SMB client (seeing Windows shares from the Unix box). It also lets you set up roaming profiles just as you would if you were using NT- in fact, you can tell the Windows machines that they are logging on to an NT domain! The new version does not require licensing when installed on 5.0.4 and greater.

Patches are important! The 3.0 version had a print bug which caused it to lose print jobs greater than 2872 characters. That was fixed with a supplement ( see ftp://stage.caldera.com/vision/VisionFS

Note that for 5.0.4 you do not install from the Vision CD thoughtfully packed with your distribution. Instead, you mount the OS installation CD and install from that. See http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/ta.pl?108277 if you accidentally did install from the Vision CD.

OpenServer 5.0.4 requires RS504C: http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/ta.pl?105811

The 5.0.5 release includes specific directions for installing Visionfs.

There are several things that can prevent a successful install. First, you can't run AFPS or LAN Manager Client. See http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/ta.pl?108209 for directions on that.

Next, netbios can't run. I think the Unixware install takes care of that automatically, but on Openserver you'll need to do:

netbios stop

mv /etc./rc2.d/S86netbios /etc/rc2.d/s86netbios

If S86netbios doesn't exist, vi /etc/netbios and add an "exit 0" at the top.

Check that your hostname is correct by trying

grep `hostname` /etc/hosts

or

ping `hostname`

If these don't work, Visionfs won't license (latest versions on Unixware and OSR5 do not need licensing).

See http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/ta.pl?108271 for other suggestions.

On Unixware, the automatic process installs a fully licensed version. On 5.0.4, you need to license the product separately (this is no longer true- the 3.x versions do not need to be licensed). The documentation implies that you get a chance to do this during the install; if this is correct I've somehow managed to miss that opportunity so far. To license after the fact, you need to run

/usr/vision/bin/visionfs license

NONE OF THAT APPLIES TO CURRENT VERSIONS ON OSR5 and UNIXWARE!

There are numerous things that can keep this from working, the most likely of which would be a misconfiguration of TCP/IP. One simple test is to run

ping `hostname`

(note that those are backquotes: the left leaning single quote usually found under the "~" on your keyboard)

If this doesn't work, the visionfs license server won't be running, and you won't be able to license the product. In this case, either your hostname is wrong or you don't have proper routing to yourself (route add yourbox 127.0.0.1 should fix that).

After getting things running on the Unix side, the machine should start to show up in Network Neighborhood on the Windows machines. Keep in mind that there are timing issues here: without a reboot it may take a few minutes for the Unix box to appear. Even with rebooting every machine on the network, it still may take a few minutes, so go have a break.

To speed things up, shoose "Start->Run" and just type the name of the Sco server preceded by two backslashes:

\\scobox

Once it does appear, you may have password issues. I'll cover some of them below, but if you run into trouble, I suggest you just access SCO's search pages, select "Visionfs" and search for "password".

Some articles of particular concern are:

• http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/ta.pl?108198 for NT
• http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/ta.pl?109220 for Win95

Other issues involve Security levels and length of password: See http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/ta.pl?108227 and http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/ta.pl?108108 and

Things you need to understand about Windows passwords:

A windows user can have a password. That password may or may not be used for authentication. Whether or not it logs onto an NT domain depends on the setting in the Network portion of control panel.

If it isn't logging into a domain, the password is still used to authenticate network connections such as Visionfs.

The password on the windows machine and the password on Visionfs can be different, though it is easier if they are the same. More on this below.

If you configure a share to allow guest access, the Windows users won't need to have a password to access it.

Configure the Windows machines as "Client for Microsoft Networks". This gives you the opportunity to assign a Windows login and password that matches your Unix login, which makes things far less confusing.

Once you've done that, you have a choice on the Windows shutdown menu that lets you close all programs and login as a different user. This is an easy way to gain access to the Administrator's programs which give you a Windows based way to configure Visionfs.

When you ran the Visionfs setup program, you assigned a Visionfs Administrator-probably root. If you don't know who you assigned, run /usr/vision/bin/visionfs setup again.

If you have a user who can't get Visionfs shares to appear, you can either connect as the Visionfs administrator and use the Windows Visionfs Profile Editor (it's in the Visionfs share) or use the Unix command line method (covered below) to change their password).

Visionfs has 3 possible ways to authenticate passwords: it can use plain-text Unix passwords, encrypted Windows passwords, or it can pass authentication off to an NT server.

If you use Unix passwords, and are running Windows 98 or Windows 95 with certain patches, or Windows NT, you will need to run "regedit" and add a DWORD Value to allow plain text passwords:: open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE->System->CurrentControlSet->Services->VXD. Highlight VNETSUP, and then Edit, Add DWORD. Name it "EnablePlainTextPassword", and then modify it to have a value of "1".

For Windows 2000, wayne_v@my-deja.com offered this:

If your 3rd party SMB (Server Message Block) server requires
unencrypted passwords:
1.      Start / Programs / Administrative Tools / Local Security
Policy.
2.      Expand the Security Settings / Local Policy / Security Options
tree.
3.      Double-click Send unencrypted passwords to connect to third-
party SMB servers.
4.      Press the Enabled radio button.
NOTE: If domain-level security is defined, it will take precedence.
This option will weaken your overall security. See if the vendor has an
update.

As you'd have to do that on every Windows machine, it's better to use one of the other methods. Passing it off to an NT server takes the SCO box right out of the loop: if NT says the user is OK, then SCO believes it. Using encrypted Windows passwords requires more initial setup:

First, run /usr/vision/bin/visionfs password --wizard. This lets you import Unix users into the Visionfs password database. You can assign them a blank password, a random password, make everybody's password the same, or make their password match their Unix name. I'd suggest making every password the same or matching their user name initially.

You really want to use encrypted passwords if you possibly can.

If Windows users already have passwords (remember, even if they don't have any authentication, they can have passwords), you've got a couple of ways to handle this:

• Change the Windows password (Start->Settings->Control Panel->Passwords)
• Let them change their Visionfs password after they connect to the visionfs share (they'll need the password you assigned to do this, of course).
• Change the users password from the Unix command line. For example, to change "tom" to have password "2long2no", you'd run
  

  
  /usr/vision/bin/visionfs password --amend tom 2long2no
  
  
  

  Note that unless you ran the password wizard, a user won't have a Visionfs password. Add it like this:

  
  

  
  /usr/vision/bin/visionfs password --add tom tomspassword
  
  
  

Dynamic bring-up and Visionfs

By default, Visionfs broadcasts on the network. If you have a dynamic outgoing ppp link on the same server, the broadcasts keep your dynamic ppp up even if otherwise idle. The Visionfs server "scobox" can be modified using Profile Editor to disable naming (Profile Editor-Server-Edit->Properties->Advanced->Disable Naming). This will stop the broadcast, but it will now be impossible for any windows machine to access "scobox" unless they have persistent network drives mapped to it, or run "//scobox" from the File menus, and have an Lmhosts file referencing "scobox":

If the IP address of "scobox" was 10.1.36.3, you would need C:\WINDOWS\LMHOSTS to look like:

10.1.36.3       scobox  #PRE

Note that the file name is LMHOSTS, not LMHOSTS.TXT or LMHOSTS.SAM (that's a sample file that explains how LMHOSTS works). Watch that if you are using NOTEPAD or WORDPAD to create this.

Also see http://aplawrence.com/cgi-bin/ta.pl?110498

Printing to Windows Printers

If a Windows printer is shared ( see Windows Network Configuration, you can print to it from Unix programs. Note that the user of that machine does not necessarily need to be logged in to Unix or even to Visionfs; the printer just needs to be shared. To do this, see Visionfs Printing and the related Visionfs Laserjet Script

Termlite

If you need a simple and pretty fair terminal emulator, consider the Termlite product. If you open the readme file in the Termlite folder on the CD (either locally on the PC or through the Visionfs share), you'll find the license key to use (on 5.0.5 it is the same as the Visionfs license). You can run the setup.exe program over the net or locally. Recent versions don't install correctly on Windows; you need to copy "termlite.no" from the share to the Program Files/Vision/Termlite directory.

See also Printing to Windows Printers

Enter your email address for automatic notification of new posts here
(be sure to whitelist 'feedburner.com' if you use spam filtering)

Or use any RSS reader

Delivered by FeedBurner

---

Views for this page
Today	This Week	This Month	This Year	Overall
11	30	142	2,585	22,163

Have you tried Searching this site?

Unix/Linux/Mac OS X support by phone, email or on-site: Support Rates

This is a Unix/Linux resource website. It contains technical articles about Unix, Linux and general computing related subjects, opinion, news, help files, how-to's, tutorials and more. We appreciate comments and article submissions.

Publishing your articles here