Subject: [netatalk-admins] netatalk vs. commercial products

From: "Sean A. Snyder" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Mar 1998 18:21:33 -0500

Greetings!

I've been lurking on the list here for a while, and figured that I'd
finally post....  Hopefully this posting won't start a flamewar...

I'm really curious to hear about people's experiences with netatalk
in a 300+ user "mission-critical" commercial/production near-24x7 
environment.  I'm also wondering what experiences people have had 
with various commercial products that do roughly the same thing as 
netatalk.

In reading the netatalk web page, I was slightly disheartened to
read the following in regards to the pending release of 1.4b3:

"The solaris kernel module is rewritten, eliminating many routing 
problems and kernel panics."

Can anyone shed any light on the kernel panic problem with Solaris
and version 1.4b2?   How serious is it, etc?

FYI:
At present, I'm using Information Presentation
Technologies' (www.iptech.com) "uShare" product to share files
from my 3 Sun Sparc1000E servers to about 150 macs/server.  Each of
these servers has 50-70 gig of disk hung off of them.  Version
4.1f of their product worked just find under Solaris 2.5.1.  For
a variety of reasons, I needed to upgrade to Solaris 2.6, which
in-turn forced me to upgrade to uShare 5.0, which is the biggest
P.O.S. i've ever seen.  It has crashed one of my servers at LEAST once
a day for the past week.  

Also, I'm using Samba to share these files to our few
PCs, and it is the coolest thing since sliced bread. We are, however,
running into issues with the PCs not knowing the file-type/creator
information due to their reliance on *.doc style extensions.  

I've spent some time evaluating Syntax's TotalNet Advanced Server,
which allows me to share the same files to both Macs and PCs.  I
liked the web-based admin interface it has (allows me to offload
some of my responsibility on the junior admins), but I'm just
not happy with their support (or lack thereof), nor an I happy
with all of the orphan processes it creates.  This is especially
problematic these orphans are considered "active connections", and
the product refuses logins when you have exceeded your licensed
number of connections.  Plus, it's REALLY REALLY REALLY 'spensive,
IMHO.

Thanks in advance!

Sean

-- 
___________________________________________                         
Sean A. Snyder ([email-masked])         \ Strange but not a stranger
Systems Administrator                       \ I'm an ordinary guy... 
Campbell-Ewald Advertising/C-E Communications\_________________________
***** All opinions are mine and mine only ...   yadda yadda yadda  *****

---

From: "Paul M. Fleming" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 09:59:25 -0600 (CST)

We currently use uShare on an AIX machine and netatalk on three linux machines. 
I prefer netatalk hands down. uShare has a pretty GUI, but doesn't offer
any better functionality than netatalk. (I also think it's a P.O.S) 
The Netatalk servers also seem to be faster, plus with uShare we have problems 
with files created on the Unix side not showing up at all on the mac side. 
I'm also using Samba and with the proper tweaking you can get samba, mac, 
unix users to coexists with little problem. (that include files creators etc)

Hope this helps..

Paul