Subject: [netatalk-admins] Trash problems

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 10:21:23 +0100

Memphisto <[email-masked]> just wrote about some problems with the trash
under Netatalk and he asked if the trash can behaviour was documented
anywhere. I know I've seen similar problems discussed in the past, but
there seems to not have been any consensus as to the problem (or its
solution).

I've seen exactly the same problems as Memphisto described, except with a
Linux server. As he described, all clients logged in as the same user and
sometimes a file thrown in the trash on Mac A appears in the trash of other
Macs. Also, entire folders have been know to vanish from the shared disks
and end up in a trash can. Thankfully, this doesn't happen very often,
though of course this makes it harder to track down. So, what's happening
here ? Is it a Netatalk or Mac problem i.e. does Netatalk (or any Appletalk
server, for that matter) do any special handling of trash or is it that
when a client connects to a shared folder, it looks for a folder called
Network Trash Folder, and then looks in there for folders called Trash Can
#n and then creates for itself a folder called Trash Can #m, where m = (max
n) + 1. Does the confusion arise when >1 clients manage to both believe
they should use Trash Can #X ?
Does anyone know what's going on here :-( ?

Kindest regards,

Niall  O Broin

UNIX Network Administrator               Ground Systems Engineering
Department
European Space Operations Centre         [email-masked]
Darmstadt, Germany                 Ph./Fax  +49 6151 90 3619/2179

---

From: Sak Wathanasin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1998 22:33:39 +0100

In reply to David Winkel's message of the 28/09/98 at 13:39,

> > Adrian: on another note, what sort of performance improvement areas would
>you
> > think are best pursued.  I seem to get very high transfer rates (with
> > inferior os's like Windows NT) with SAMBA - but with netatalk, I get no
>more
> > than about 600-650k/sec with netatalk.  Would read-ahead/prediction code
> > help?  Larger i/o buffers perhaps?  Or perhaps read/write overlapping
> > technology
>
> I know someone who's been doing some fairly serious performance testing,
> mostly to see why web servers do better file throughput on NT than they do
> on unix.  The reason is that NT allows for one system call to transfer an
> entire file out of a socket.  Which means that the entire transfer is done

Very interesting; I'm not sure I believe it, but quite irrelevant in this case.
Using "netatalk-1.4b2+asun2.0a18.2", I get just under 1 MByte/sec with Finder
copies to a netatalk server (a mere P200 running Linux RH 5.0).  FTP is still
faster but not by much. An xfer rate of "about 600-650k/sec" suggests that
there's something wrong; perhaps the client is connecting via AppleTalk rather
than IP (do a "Get Info" on the mounted volume).

Sak Wathanasin
Network Analysis Limited
178 Wainbody Ave South, Coventry CV3 6BX, UK

Internet: [email-masked]
Phone: (+44) 1203 419996                    Fax: (+44) 1203 690690

---

From: Cameron Hart <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1998 11:46:28 +1300

> well, i can usually saturate 10BaseT in at least one direction in my
> current setup. having g3's really helps here. unfortunately, i only
> get about 4.5MB/s max throughput w/ 100BaseT in my setup and have
> annoying slowdowns in a linux -> g3 running os 8.1 direction. i
> actually suspect the current mac os of being the culprit, but i need
> to load linux on the g3 to be sure.

Netatalk can definetly go faster than 4.5MB/s. Using Linux 2.0.35 on an
AMD
K6/300 with a 2 disk RAID 0 array, I managed to get read and write
speeds of over 7MB/s. On
the Mac side I think we were using an 8600 running 8.5 beta. This was of
course
over a 100Base T network. We used Helios LAN test, with just the 30MB
read/write
test.

-cam.