Subject: [netatalk-admins] Re:

From: Anthony Johnston <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 98 11:49:55 -0500

I haven't applied the patches yet, but I would be very interested in 
knowing what it is about MacOS or netatalk that causes this problem. I 
notice that (when viewed from my mac) there seems to be an update of some 
kind, the number of items listed in the title bar increases by one and 
very quickly decreases back, the icons in the window do there little 
dancing thing, and then it pauses. Is this simply a screen refresh or 
network update, or another crazy AppleTalk anomaly? I haven't looked at 
the source code for any of this yet, and I probably don't know enough at 
this point to be much help in that way anyway.

I'd be interested in knowing more about this.

Anthony

Albert Lai said something resembling:

>>>
>>> I just installed the upgrade to MacOS 8.1 and now my shared volumes are
>>> doing the "skipping icons" thing. This was a problem with our NT server
>>> and I had a lot of people convinced that Linux was way cooler because it
>>> didn't do things like that (and because it is much faster). But as we get
>>> ready to migrate towards 8.1 I will need to find a solution to this
>>> problem. Anybody have any thoughts?
>>
>>Have you applied the "Dancing Icons" patches from umich (or have the latest
>>asun)
>
>I too am having the "Dancing Icons" problem. I have tried both the umich
>patches and the asun ones, and I still have the problem. I am running
>netatalk on RedHat 5.0 and MacOS 8.1 on the Mac. Not sure what's going on
>on my machine. Haven't had the chance to try them on the stock MacOS 8
>though. Any ideas? Thanks.
>

---

From: a sun <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 1998 09:33:10 -0800 (PST)

this should probably be a FAQ. could people who maintain such things
add it in? here's a synopsis of the skipping icon problem, the
solution, and why the solution doesn't always work:

	1) in os8, apple is now using more bits of the finder info
	   field than it did before. netatalk can cleverly do file
	   typing based upon dot suffixes. to do that, they generate
	   the appropriate creator/type fields and send them
	   back. unpatched versions of netatalk-1.4b2 assumed that
	   sticking 0's in this field would be an all right
	   thing. 

	   result: os8 macs see the incorrect finder info field and
	           try to update it. as this was a "virtual" field
	           anyway, it never got updated, resulting in constant
	           attempts to update.

	2) the solution involves allowing os8 to actually go in and
	   update the finder info while still generating our own
	   creator/type fields.
	
	3) why doesn't the solution always work? this may be due to a
	   couple reasons:	
		a) you're not actually allowed to modify the
	           appropriate .AppleDouble file. make sure the
	           .AppleDouble files are modifiable at least long
		   enough to fix the finder info.  

		b) the appropriate .AppleDouble file somehow got
	           scrambled in a way that isn't easily fixed. your
	           best bet here is to remove the offending
	           files. hopefully, they shouldn't have any resource
	           fields as they represent auto-generated info.

-a

---

From: Edan Idzerda <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 1998 16:06:09 -0500 (EST)

> solution, and why the solution doesn't always work:

I thought this was a nice summary and put it on my netatalk-on-solaris
mini web page.

	http://www.cec.mtu.edu/Doc/FAQ/netatalk.html

Seemed worth the 10 minutes.  :)

- edan