Re: Locking propigation probelm samba to netatalk & netatalk tosamba


Subject: Re: Locking propigation probelm samba to netatalk & netatalk tosamba
From: Hauke Fath (hf@Tangro.DE)
Date: Thu Mar 15 2001 - 04:28:19 EST


At 10:54 14.03.01 -0500, testing roaming wrote:
> I've been living with various appleshare servers for more
>than a decade -- implementations from Pacer software on VMS (gasp)
>and Unix, CAP, Netatalk. Several vendors attempted implementations
>of what they called "NFS/Share" or something like that. All, as
>I recall, were horrendously slow -- not for file transfer but for
>duirectory scanning. This was explained to me as having
>to do with the way in which Appleshare get's to know what is in
>subdirectories and required single iterative calls to find out what
>was there -- very bad if your directory has a few thousand files.
>I don't know if this is a technical issue that can't be overcome,
>but it seemed not to be trivial.

NFS, designed as stateless (all operations are synchronous), is not really
fast, itself. And having to emulate file metadata operations that are
designed into AppleTalk/AppleShare does not make it any faster.

The overall consensus seems to be that supporting the clients' native
network protocols on the server side (Samba, Netatalk) works out better
than mapping network protocols on the client side (to NFS, SMB, whatever).

>I believe they all disappeared. Are any still around that
>you know of?

No. Even the Open Source NFS server project for the Mac was cancelled.

         hauke

--
Hauke Fath                        Tangro Software Components GmbH
                                         D-69115 Heidelberg
hf@Tangro.DE                       Ruf +49-6221-13336-0, Fax -21



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Sun Oct 14 2001 - 03:04:34 EDT