Subject: [netatalk-admins] Disappearing icons on Netatalk 1.3.3

From: "Pyfrom, Mark" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 1998 14:08:00 -0500

hello all, 

I just installed Netatalk on our new Linux server. (Dell 2200, 224MB
ram, 3com 3c90510/100, 3 9gb disks, RedHat 4.2). and I have been having
problems of all sorts. 

first we installed it on a lesser machine (running RedHat 4.2) and it
ran well for 4 months. not one second of downtime. Then I install it on
the new machine. It runs for 1-8 hours then the afpd daemon dies. (the
main daemon dies leaving the children running. The error message a user
gets is "The server is temporally unavailable, please try again.") 

So I looked to the Netatalk home page and I found a bug that cause this
bug, but only on Solaris machines. So I upgraded to 1.4b2 and applied
the patch (it is a libatalk bug). It still crashed. ok... So I went back
to 1.3.3 and manually applied the patch to the 1.3.3 libatalk and bingo,
the server has been up ever since... however.....

Now the users are reporting (and I can reproduce) the icons in a given
window, usually window of several icons like 150+, disappear. then after
a while they reappear..... I didn't have this problem when I was running
1.4b2, but it would crash.......

one thing of note. the new server is also a samba server and an INND
server. it does get quite a bit of traffic. Also the afp volumes served
are NFS mounted from an AIX box running AIX 4.1.5.

so my questions.

1. Is there anything I can do that would make 1.4b2 more stable. I would
prefer it because it was faster and it didn't have the problem with the
icon disappearing. Ethernet config options? afpd options...?

2. Did my hacking the libatalk on 1.3.3 introduce the bug of the
disappearing icons? I don't think so, but I am not a very strong network
program and know almost zero about AppleTalk protocols.

3. Any other musings that you may have.....

Any hints or though would be appreciated. Thankyou for reading my long
winded message.

Mark Pyfrom
Unix Systems Specialist
Middlebury College
1-802-443-2010
[email-masked]