Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] Scaling issues

From: "Eddie Irvine" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1998 19:53:44 +1000

>How big are other folks' netatalk installations?  We're primarily concerned
>with the filesharing aspects (rather than printing) - as a heavily Mac'd
>campus, we see a *lot* of use on our current in-house Mac-only fileserver,
>and a replacement will have to perform at least in the ballpark.

We have a site of 46 Macs, one brand new Mac fileserver (Appleshare IP 5)
and netatalk on FreeBSD. A bit hard to compare the Mac with FreeBSD because
the Mac's hardware is about three times as fast (3x more ram, SCCSI vs IDE
etc)
however if you want to speed things up on your network you can do what we
did -
use a netatalk box as a router to break your appletalk network into zones,
and then
use Appleshare in multi-homing mode. This makes a huge difference with
10baseT
and modern hardware as it is really the network which is the bottle neck.

This can give the best of both worlds.

>For the larger sites - how many simulataneous connections can a netatalk
>machine support?

I think it defaults to 5, but there is a command line option to increase.

Eddie.

---

From: Alistair Riddell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1998 21:14:24 +0100 (BST)

> use Appleshare in multi-homing mode. This makes a huge difference with

Unfortunately Macs cannot multihome with TCP-IP, only with AppleTalk.
Netatalk should be able to take advantage of TCP-IP multihoming which is
available in any Unix.

-- 
Alistair Riddell - BOFH
IT Support Department, George Watson's College, Edinburgh
Tel: +44 131 447 7931 Ext 176       Fax: +44 131 452 8594
Microsoft - because god hates us