Subject: [netatalk-admins] one person's take on linux/netatalk

From: Wagner One <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 08:57:16 -0500

This is an excerpt from a discussion of possible server chioces from 
macintouch. These were some concerns regarding linux/netatalk of one 
participant.

You can read the entire discussion at:
http://www.macintouch.com/mxshighavail.html

"Our other option was LINUX. This runs lightning fast on a 100mhz pentium 
with 48 megs of RAM. The system is brilliant. It backs itself up and has 
a free proxy server, so now all our machines share the same internet 
connection.

BUT as a fileserver it's just not acceptable. The free program for 
AppleTalk with LINUX (NETATALK) is 6 years old, and doesn't support 
everything it should. The biggest problems we've found are: 1) aliases 
don't work to a LINUX share. This means having to go through the network 
browser, or chooser every time you want to get to a folder. It's a big 
frustration thing. 2) printing images (esp. from Photoshop) sometimes 
hangs the printer queue and sometimes just drops that printing job. 3) 
files with illegal names (ie. 32 character or having illegal characters) 
just don't show up. This is a problem because when you copy whole folders 
you can miss files without even know it. 4) We've had lots of problems 
where files put on the LINUX shares by PCs are "in use" when Mac users 
try to get them, which makes us resort to Zip drives to get files across 
the room. "

--
Mike Wagner - A bad Dead show is better than a good day at work...
[email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]

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From: Geoff Ghose <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Jun 1999 17:33:26 +0000

> you can miss files without even know it. 4) We've had lots of problems

I find this a problem also.  I was wondering if there could be a afpd option
that "munges"
filenames to 32 characters so they at least appear in Finder.  Mind you I'm
not sure
how decide which 32 characters to take; certainly it should include
everything after the
last dot (since this is the extension on most non-Mac systems).

Any thoughts?

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From: a sun <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 10:35:32 -0700 (PDT)

I find this a problem also.  I was wondering if there could be a
   afpd option that "munges" filenames to 32 characters so they at
   least appear in Finder.  Mind you I'm not sure how decide which 32
   characters to take; certainly it should include everything after
   the last dot (since this is the extension on most non-Mac systems).

well, my plan is to have filename mappings between unix name, pc name,
mac name, and unicode names as part of my database
implementation. note: this is only a problem currently if you put
files there with other programs.

anyways, which is really better: ignoring > 31 character filenames, or
crashing? i'll give you a hint: our favorite fruit flavored company
does the latter in their current os x server implementation.

-a

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From: Patrik Schindler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 20:14:46 +0200

At 17:33 Uhr +0000 04.06.1999, Geoff Ghose wrote:

>filenames to 32 characters so they at least appear in Finder.
>Any thoughts?

Yep, I think, there has been some sort of fixing from Adrian. In original 1.4b2, the Mac displayed various error messages, from -50 to "File not found", I even had freezes.
But in my eyes, what could be fine (but has nothing to do with the length) is some sort of translating the umlauts to iso-8859-1 instead of escaping them.

:wq! PoC