Subject: [netatalk-admins] reliability question

From: "Mike O'Connell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 13:51:33 -0700 (MST)

Hi all,
  I've been asked to admin a fileserver for PC and Mac, using NT. I'd MUCH
prefer to use some flavor of UNIX to do the job, for obvious reasons.  My
question is, how reliable is netatalk in serving from a Solaris or Linux
(Intel) machine ? Are there a slew of tweaks to add in order to do so, or
can a basic fileserver be expected to dish out various sound, text and
other files without too much modification in a reliable manner. Uptimes
would help me make my pitch, I'm sure, but more detailed triumphs and
horror stories would help me get a broader view of netatalk's
effectiveness. 

Thanks,
  Mike O'Connell
  Linguistics Grad student CU-Boulder

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From: Casey Bisson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 10:03:43 -0500

On a campus with 5,500 users in the NIS database and 200 macs, my pentium 166
running freebsd and linux has only ever gone down for physical reconfigs (moving
location, powerplugs, or network).

It chugs along without a hitch, while when we tested NT for the job throughput was
much lower on a faster server box and it didn't support NIS of NFS (which later
became essential to us).

For us, our argument against NT was:
1. FreeBSD is cheaper, with no per client licensing
2. FreeBSD is more scalable and require less expensive hardware (NIS and NFS
allows us to create 'pseudo clusters' of inexpensive machines)
3. Security & stability., NT can't match any unix.
4. Future: NT is controlled by a single organization which can't release bug fixes
or upgrades on time or on schedule. FreeBSD is a worldwide group of developers who
have been releasing bug fixes, patches, upgrades, and new releases on schedule and
on time. Free UNIX installations are growing faster than any other server OS.

Your mileage may vary, but the arguments for linux are much the same.

Casey Bisson
Plymouth State College