Subject: Re: Commercial alternative to Netatalk?

From: Paul Krohn <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 22:18:08 -0700

i've got a 75 user licencse for Syntax TotalNet. We run it on an HA pair 
of Sun Enterprise 250 servers, and use only the AppleShare services.

plusses:

their support folks are easily accessible and very helpful
the software has ultimately proved very reliable, current uptime is 80+ 
days.
it's very fast
aliases work
administration is essentially zero, in my experience, there's a gooey 
web-browser thing if you hate the command-line.

minusses:

-the support staff don't always understand HA
-the support staff don't always understand appleshare issues (ie that afp 
connections are stateful and restarting services disconnects everyone)
-it's a little cpu-hungry
-finder windows don't 'refresh' automatically* if another user copies a 
file onto a server volume -- windoze users accept this, but mac folks 
need to be told about 1,000 times that they need to close & re-open 
windows to see changes.
-expensive
-restoring files and getting the finder attributes (type & creator) is 
hit or miss, because the resource forks are tied to the inode (!!) rather 
than the file name. there's a utility provided to work around this, but 
it's far from 100%.
-there are weird limitations to the 'tncp' and 'tncp' utilities, like you 
can't tnmv across volumes, for whatever reason.

* is this or is this not true of all unix-based afp servers?