[TriLUG] Linux Fileservers & MacOS 8/9 clients

[John Franklin]

On Friday, Jun 13, 2003, at 15:53 US/Eastern, Chris Magnus Hedemark 
wrote:

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> On Friday, June 13, 2003, at 03:48 PM, Jaimie.Livingston at haht.com 
> wrote:
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>> Has anyone had any experience using Linux fileservers with MacOS 8/9
>> clients?
>> Is the preferred method to use Samba on Linux and then something like 
>> Dave
>> (a samba client generally used with Windows fileservers), or are 
>> there other
>> solutions I haven't found yet.
>
> Linux will happily do Appletalk natively for you, so nothing special 
> will be needed on the client side.

I'll +1 this with a caveat.  The latest 1.6.2 release of netatalk is 
pretty solid, but doesn't include AFP 3.0 features that are in OS X.  
Most important of these is a limit on the length of filenames, which 
matches OS 8 (and 9, IIRC), but OS X will not be able to copy longer 
named files to the server.  Long named files already on the server 
currently get mangled in a manner similar to FAT's Long File Name vs 
8.3 scheme.

It can also be a bit slow.  Especially on larger directories.  This is 
mostly because of the volume of requests that Finder sends to the 
server, which increases with the number of files in the directory.  
Real Macs are more-or-less optimized for the requests, but for everyone 
else it means a lot of open(); read_some_finder_data(); close(); 
sequences.  On large directories, it tends to thrash the disk and blow 
the vnode and buffer caches on the server.

I know the netatalk guys are working on AFP3.0 support.  I'm waiting 
for a beta of it to be released myself.

jf
-- 
John Franklin
franklin at elfie.org
ICBM: 35°43'56"N 78°53'27"W