Consolidating Client for OES Platform requests and associated client requests under www1.v1ideas.com/.../15373 Marking this as completed, as the alternative tag is only inappropriate, which is clearly not the case.

this explains why mono may not be a good idea. also there is no mono support in SLES12 or SLED12 www.osnews.com/.../

David, that Mono-relatd article was from 2011. Since that time, MS has open sourced .NET, and Mono 4 was just released in May of this year. I'm not advocating for anything based on Mono (I dislike the entire .NET paradigm, frankly), but whatever Attachmate may have done to Novell's original Mono project should have little bearing on anything at this point. Qt might be a good choice for the GUI interface, at least, but as for the core components under the hood, I'm not familiar enough with the Mac to render an opinion. I do agree with the earlier mention of *not* doing this in Java, however.

Some random thoughts; For most linux users in NSS environments, I suspect the majority of us are Administrators who simply use scp/ftp/cifs against the NSS volumes to move files. The Novell NCP Client that was available for SLE 11 was almost acceptable, but it was always behind/breaking with routine linux patches and it is no longer available for SLE 12. I suspect the old linux NCP client was taking too much in the way of resources to actively maintain. Improved native linux NCP support would be very helpful, even if it is just for current Suse releases and even if support is only limited to improving ncpmount (for example, it could be better integrated into current Suse supported File Managers, Add a Yast NCP configuration module if necessary, etc.). Perhaps even a native Filr client for Suse linux would help most use cases as Filr seems to be the future multi-platform client, but there are limitations and it offers no where near the performance of NCP or even CIFS.

We have been running into problems using Novell CIFS time and time again on Macs, mostly due to the fact that Apple has a complete disregard for backward compatibility (and is proud about it). Novell CIFS engineers do their best to fix problems with every new Mac OS release, but this chase is impossible to win, because Apple and MSFT have partnered up lately. MicroFocus needs to control both sides of the equation (server and client) to stay on the ball in this chase (just like they do on Windows). It is not possible to guaranty results if you depend on someone else (i.e. Apple) to deliver half of the user experience for network file access (well, more then half actually). I think a Mac OS X NCP client will isolate Novell quite a bit from Apple's stance that pushing latest features for home users outweighs breaking things for Novell users.