Subject: [netatalk-admins] Netatalk and Netapps?

From: [email-masked]
Date: 31 Mar 1999 17:42:41 -0000

>From what I see in the afpd.8 man page, it does not look like netatalk
plays "nicely" with NFS:
     AFP byte-range  locking  is  not  implemented.   afpd  gives
     proper  responses,  but  does  no actual locking.  Moreover,
     synchronization locks  use  the  flock(2)  interface.   This
     interface is not usually ``NFS-aware''.

Is that the right conclusion to come to?  In particular I was thinking of
solving our "make disk space available through SMB and AFP" desires with a
NetApp.  Assuming the NetApp can do SMB itself and also export the
disks over NFS to another machine running Netatalk which would do
the AFP work.  (Oh, that AFP were important enough for netapp to support
natively...)  

But from the quote above, I'm guessing that this would be impossible.
Please confirm or deny my thoughts.  Thanks,
	bjh

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From: Casey Bisson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 15:43:16 -0500

I have been running netatalk (many versions, now asun's 2.1.3) on FreeBSD (many versions,
now 3.1) with a NetApp F230, doing just what I think you're hoping to. We have about 250
Macs in student clusters and on staff/faculty desktops.

I haven't worried to much about locking (it hasn't been a problem).

We have, however, decided not to use the NetApp's SMB support, and use an intermediary
server just as with netatalk. That decision was based on security concerns: because of the
amount and variety of data on the NetApp and the unknown stability of it's networking
stack. We created a "backside" or "storage area network" with a 100baseT switch and second
100baseT ethernet in all servers. The only traffic on that backside net was NIS or NFS
among the servers. This way, the NetApp only saw traffic from a limited set of machines,
and a malicious user would need to gain root (or exploit in some other way) on those
servers to send traffic to the NetApp.

Casey Bisson
Plymouth State College