Subject: [netatalk-admins] byte-lock question

From: Anthony Johnston <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 13:25:27 +0000

Greetings,

/* brief congratulatory interlude */

I'll start by saying thanks to everyone who has put so much hard work into
netatalk. Thank you. This weekend I replaced our NT file/print server with
a Linux (RH 5.1) running netatalk, doing file and print services for about
23 macs in our little publishing facility here. The NT print spooler has a
bug/memory leak which AFAIK the official M$ position is "Wait for the next
service pack (time frame undetermined) or upgrade to NT 5". Or don't print,
I guess. My boss called me into his office last friday afternoon and said
"Well Anthony, here's your chance to show me what Linux can do."

Needless to say I haven't done anything but install it, really.

/* end interlude */

So now that I am set up, I have some questions about netatalk. First and
foremost is the byte lock issue. I have been reading back over the messages
over the past couple of months and I am still not sure if this is something
I need to be worried about. I saw in some posts that files were corrupted
along with syslog messages such as:

Jul 15 08:31:20 what afpd[22856]: byte lock: 1162A NY CE Flyer: 0
Jul 15 08:31:20 what last message repeated like, 1 million times
etc.

However later there is a post that says these messages are harmless.
Patrick states correctly that these messages show up when working in Excel,
which is the only app I have seen so far that causes this. I haven't seen
any file corruption yet, and I'd like to keep it that way. Also, I haven't
looked at the code (see below) so I wonder if there is somewhere else I
could learn more about this.

Number 2. I am using the RPM version from ftp.redhat.com/contrib/and_so_on
for 5.1 redhat. There is no source RPM. Should I try to compile the usual
source or is the source available for the build I am running?
(netatalk-1.4b2+asun2.0a18.2-phh4) Hmmm.

Last, I just started reading Inside Macintosh about networking stuff, but I
wonder if someone could say why or what the reason is that AppleTalk
connections seem to time out so much. Sorry if that's a boneheaded
question, but I'm just trying to understand.

Thank you,

ant