Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] odd saving behavior

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 98 15:21:29 PST

Original message sent on Mon, Mar 30  2:08 PM by [email-masked] (John Sutton) :

> Not wishing to be (too) provocative here, I have to ask:  Does anybody use
> netatalk successfully in a "real world" environment?  And if yes, how do
> they do it?  Guidelines please... :-)

I'm using netatalk 1.4b2 as the primary file server for two departments, one
with 8 people who use it mostly as a way to get files from Linux to the Mac, the
other with 4 people who do graphics work with 2-4MB files opened/saved off the
server constantly.  I've had to do quite a bit of tinkering with netatalk, but I
currently have it working nearly as well as the old AppleShare 4.2.1 server it
replaced (better, when you consider that it is nearly 2x as fast and I only have
1 machine to back up instead of 2).

The only remaining problem is the "persistent file ID" limitation, and I have
been able to come up with work-arounds for that.  The main trick depends on the
fact that aliases of regular files on netatalk volumes will always work despite
the ID problem.  Aliases of folders, and "remembered" locations within
applications, usually don't work.  So the work-around usually involves making a
folder on a local hard drive and pointing the application to that folder rather
than one directly on the netatalk volume, and then putting aliases of the real
files on the netatalk volume in that local folder.  The application can find the
folder with no trouble since it is on the hard drive, and when it opens the
"files" in it, the OS resolves the file aliases correctly even though the IDs on
the netatalk volume are different.  Sometimes it is necessary to first create
the local folder with real files in it, and go through a setup procedure in the
application that "points" it to those files, then once that is done, replace the
files with aliases of the same name that point to files on the netatalk volume. 
But so far something along these lines has worked in every case that has come
up.

Bob Smith
Hammett & Edison, Inc.
[email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1998 02:42:30 +0200

> they do it?  Guidelines please... :-)

I am sysadmin for a small multimedia company and run a linux fileserver which
servers the shared partitions via nfs to other Linux computers (only one so far),
via samba to Windows NT and Windows 95 PCs and via netatalk (1.4b2) to a 
PowerMacintosh.

So far it has performed flawlessly, after overcoming initial problems with
the shadow password. It runs on Linux 2.0.33 on a Pentium 166 (no MMX),
a Adaptec AHA2940U and SMC Ultra 10MBps and SMC EtherPower PCI 100MBps.

It also serves as a printer server for a HP LaserJet 6MP, which is also used to
print directly from the Linux computer

The only problem I experience is that printing binary data from QuarkXpress and
Freehand does not work. Printing from Photoshop and printing documents from
Quark and Freehand that do not contain binary EPS is also ok (TIFF is fine, too).

The network setup is quite heterogeneous, One 10MBps ethernet (BNC) connecting
a PC (486, running Win95 and Linux), the server and, via a small HUB, the Mac;
and a 100MBps Net between the server and the NT Workstation, which is used
for Video digitizing and editing.

Every user can import his $HOME from the UNIX workstation and a shared partition
with the "sticky" bit set, so that everyone can write to it and create new files
but no-one can erase other user's files.

-- 
Bernd Sieker