Subject: [netatalk-admins] byte lock, etc.

From: Anthony Johnston <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 17:35:18 +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

---

From: Marc Matteo <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 15:22:55 -0700

>(netatalk-1.4b2+asun2.0a18.2-phh4) Hmmm.

Hmmm, the only rpm/srpm in ftp.redhat.com/contrib I could find is
netatalk-1.4b2+asun2.1.0-5.  I used it as a model for building a
netatalk-1.4b2+asun2.0a18.2 rpm package for my personal use (I didn't
want to mess with the asun2.1 prepatch stuff yet).
If the RPM is working for you then you probably won't gain much by
switching to the raw source.  Of course, if/when asun releases a new
patch then you'll have to find an upgraded RPM package, but for now
using just the RPM lets you learn more about the package w/o worrying
about it's installation.

Marc