Subject: [netatalk-admins] odd saving behavior

From: Casey Bisson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 16:04:11 -0500

I am using netatalk 1.4b3 + asun on a FreeBSD 2.2.5 machine and am experience some
odd saving behavior:

According to users, documents which they claim to have saved are not available
upon reconnect, or the files are significantly older versions. Has anybody else
seen this problem? What logs can I check to find a transcript of the problem?

I have not experienced the problem myself (I am an appleshare client on the same
server), but the users are pretty smart and I have reasonable faith in their
description of the problem.

Thank you,

Casey Bisson
Information Technology
Plymouth State College

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From: John Sutton <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 23:08:54 +0100

Sounds like the "persistent file id's" (lack of!) problem.  It may be
relevant for you to detail which applications the users concerned are
having problems with.

I have problems with Eudora and ClarisWorks which effectively render
netatalk unusable except for a techie (such as myself) who can understand
something of what is going on behind the scenes and take appropriate
corrective action when necessary.

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... :-)

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From: Brian Reid <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 98 14:30:33 -0800

> netatalk successfully in a "real world" environment?  And if yes, how ..

I use netatalk at Jordan Middle School, Palo Alto, California, USA.
We have 1200 middle school students (ages 11 through 14 years) and 80
adult teachers who use netatalk for absolutely everything. We have had
the occasional problem with older versions of Microsoft Powerpoint, but
it's easy to explain the workarounds.

I am running netatalk 1.3.3 on an ancient MIPS R2000 machine running
Ultrix 4.4; I have 5 SCSI disks and an HP 1533A DAT drive on the
machine. Students and teachers depend on it for everything.

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From: Casey Bisson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 10:25:48 -0500

ClarisWorks and PageMaker are the two most widely used applications for my users.

I think I remember some discussion concerning persistant file/folder IDs, and an
upcoming netatlk version that supported them. Is this in the works? What can a
non-programmer like myself do to help?

What steps can be taken to prevent the problem when using ClarisWorks? Are there
other applications that are notoriously effected by the problem?

Thank you

Casey Bisson
Information Technology
Plymouth State College

John Sutton wrote:

> corrective action when necessary....

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From: Bill Stewart-Cole <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 11:57:10 -0600

At 4:08 PM -0600 3/30/98, John Sutton wrote:

> netatalk successfully in a "real world" environment?

Is there some other world?

I guess the answer has to be yes. Non-techies use our netatalk-shared
directories all the time, and I even have Samba sharing the same
directories for Windows users. It is second nature for everyone. The only
chronic problem is finessing the added pleasure of having mirror work its
magic on one directory as a bidirectional synch tool. [1]

>And if yes, how do

Get the permissions stuff right. I can't say what is right for your
environment, but I guarantee that getting permissions wrong will make you
crazy because you will end up with all sorts of mysterious oddities. It's
not something that can be easily 'cookbooked' because everyone has
different security needs and ease-of-use needs. It needs to be thought out
carefully with an eye to your specific situation, and if you don't
understand the interactions between umasks, directory permissions, and how
netatalk maps Unix to AFP permissions, you will be very sad.

[1] This is rather off-topic, but does anyone know of a decent way to
bidirectionally synch directories on 2 Linux machines across a longish
stretch of the Internet where using rsh and its evil relatives is
unacceptable?  Mirror is workable with a sufficiently convoluted config,
but it really is not made for the task.