Subject: [netatalk-admins] First production installation

From: Rich Lafferty <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 17:27:50 -0400

I've been using netatalk+asun on my home LAN for quite a while, and
have had quite a bit of success with it there. Today was a different
story, though, as I rolled out the first production machine running
netatalk here at Concordia (well, the first one I'm responsible for,
anyhow).

I arrived here to find a bunch of desktop G3 boxes running ASIP and
WebSTAR, and much gnashing of teeth, with machines rebooting once
or twice a day in some cases, and webservers stopping over the weekend
with no-one onsite to restart them, and so forth.

Faced with the task of rebuilding one of these (onto a blue G3), I
set about installing linux and apache and netatalk. The tricky part
was to make this transparent to the users; they don't need to know
that they're on a new system unless they want to know. It was a bit
of a risk in hindsight having never used netatalk+asun on a large
network, or with randnum passwords, etc.

Anyhow, the machine's all set to go, and it's working like a *charm*.
So, thanks, Adrian, for providing the tools to let me move onto a
stable server platform while keeping the userbase happy.

(Speaking of keeping the userbase happy: I've put a bit of a kludge in
here to keep the Unix and AFP passwords in sync -- a wrapper around
passwd(1) and a dirty hack to have the Unix password updated when
people update their passwords via the Chooser.  Has this been
attempted before and not included because of some dramatic failure
mode that I missed, or is it just something for which a roundtuit's
never been found? I'd be happy to clean it up and see if I can't
squeeze some portability out of it (I just got my hands on a Solaris
machine as well, plus there's probably DU around here if need be) if
it's something that might be included.)

  -Rich

-- 
------------------------------ Rich Lafferty ---------------------------
 Sysadmin/Programmer, Information and Instructional Technology Services
   Concordia University, Montreal, QC                 (514) 848-7625
------------------------- [email-masked] ----------------------