Subject: incompatable, old appledouble files

From: Steve Holmes <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 13:19:50 EST

Having scanned the archive and the faq ...

I'm evaluating netatalk for our needs. We have been using a package called 
nfsshare for a number of years and have several thousand student directories 
which have been touched by it. 

Nfsshare provided nfs access to the unix servers via (obviously) nfs. It 
stored the appledouble files in the same directory as the real files by 
prepending a '%' character to the file name. It also, incidentally, 
incorrectly set a shared bit which we have had to fix in the background.

We want to rid ourselves of nfsshare. One advantage of using netatalk over 
other pricey products is that we might be able to modify the code to handle 
the % appledouble files instead of running a script to convert them all to the 
more standard ".AppleDouble/filename" method. 

My problem: I have examined the code and found that in ad_path() in the
libatalk directory, I should be able (as a first step) to change the path
prefix from ".AppleDouble" to "%" and comment out the line which adds the '/' 
to the path and expect netatalk to read the % appledouble files and re-write 
them in place.

Such is not the case. There are other occurances of the string ".AppleDouble" 
in the system and it is not clear what they are doing. In addition, netatalk 
appears to create a file with the single character name '%' instead of the 
expected %filname. 

[Ultimately, we would want netatalk to read the old AD files, but write only 
the new, standard ones, thus migrating slowly to the standard.]

I know it's a long shot, but if anyone else has tackled this problem, I'd like 
to talk with you. Secondly, if anyone else has any words of wisdom other than 
the obvious: "run the script, stupid", I'd like to hear them, too.

Thanks,
Steve.

-- 
Steve Holmes		        \http://harmony.cc.purdue.edu/~sjh
Unix Systems Administrator       \Email:[email-masked]
Purdue University Computing Center\
1408 Mathematics Building          \Phone: (765) 496-3325
West Lafayette IN 47907-1408        \

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From: Harry Zink/Netatalk List <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 21:02:43 -0800

Actually, the proper spelling of compatible is, COMPATIBLE.

CompatAble is just plain wrong.

Sorry for the interruption - an old pet peeve of mine, and I would have
figured that by now the proper spelling would have trickled down to all
social strata...

:-)

Harry

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From: "Ron Creamer" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 00:27:50 -0500

Thanks Harry for the spelling reminder, but the remark about social strata
is somewhat distasteful for some of us throughout your entire imagined
social strata.. even with the smiley face.

-Ron

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From: Steve Holmes <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 11:02:40 EST

Sorry for the misspelling. Misspelling is one of my pet peeves, too, and I'm 
usually more careful. I actually had it spelled correctly and changed it! 

Now, why hasn't anyone answered my question?? (:-).
Thanks,

Steve.

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From: Wenchi Liao <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 11:11:55 -0600

>the new, standard ones, thus migrating slowly to the standard.]

Just a question. Are you sure the % files works with netatalk?
That is, if you took a directory and changed the % files to the
appropriate .AppleDouble files, will netatalk actually
read/parse the file correctly?

At some level, the old % files have to be converted to
netatalk's .AppleDouble files. If the files are compatible
enough, then a massive script jobby would be so much simpler and
gauranteed than for netatalk to do the conversions on the fly.

What if a person doesn't mount a volume, and netatalk never gets
a chance to do the conversion? Unless you can guarantee that
everybody will mount and have this conversion done, you're
looking at mucking with the code everytime you want to rev. up
netatalk.

When I was moving some xinet's kashare stuff to netatalk, one
option was to find massive disks and copy from volume to
volume.  OTOH, xinet has a neat set of tools to do conversions
between things. Like xinet files to macbinary, then megatron to
do binary to netatalk style appledouble.

WL