NetWare Core Protocol

The NetWare Core Protocol (NCP) is a network protocol used in some products from Novell, Inc. It is usually associated with the NetWare operating system, but parts of it have been implemented on other platforms such as Linux, Windows NT and various flavors of Unix.

It is used to access file, print, directory, clock synchronization, messaging, remote command execution and other network service functions. TCP/IP and IPX/SPX (obsoleted, technical support is provided only for NetWare platform) are the supported underlying protocols. TCP/IP implementations use TCP/UDP port 524 and rely on SLP for name resolution.

Novell eDirectory uses NCP for synchronizing data changes between the servers in a directory service tree.

Server-side implementations

• Novell Open Enterprise Server
• Novell NetWare
• mars_nwe, an open-source NetWare 3.x emulator for Linux.
• File and Print Services for NetWare from Microsoft
• various NAS devices

Client-side implementations

• Novell Client for Windows Vista from Novell.
• Novell Client for Windows 2000/XP/2003 from Novell.
• Novell Client for Windows 95/98 from Novell.
• Novell Client for Linux from Novell.
• NetWare Clients for DOS from Novell - no longer supported.
• NetWare Client for Mac OS X from Prosoft Engineering.
• ncpfs, an open-source NCP client implementation for Linux.
• Client Service for NetWare from Microsoft.

External links

• NCP specification without description of underlying Netware RPC framework
• Wireshark (an open source protocol analyzer) Documentation - Fields of the NCP packet
• Making Mac OS X play nicely with Novell