Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] I'm worried..
From: David Kelly (dkelly@hiwaay.net)
Date: Tue Jan 20 1998 - 22:13:54 EST
> I've just got netatalk going fine and purring, and am about to bring
> the Server on-line for the masses..well..all twenty of us anyway..
> But, with a bit of talk recently on the list about Mac->Unix file translation,
> I'm really worried about the prospect of files being mis-translated or
> somehow corrupted. Especially important graphics and database/spreadsheet
> files..
>
> What are the opinions and experiences out there ? - Do the default mappings
> that come in AppleVolumes.system suffice to take care of everything to
> satisfaction or have they caused problems for people..?
As others have said, if a Mac wrote the file to your netatalk server
then the Type and Creator fields will be correct and will remain
correct.
I'm trying to solve a different problem with my netatalk server than you
are. I'm receiving data via email on the FreeBSD system, reformating it,
then "posting" it to a public read-only directory for others to use. In
this case I want sane settings for .gz, .zip, and .txt, for files that
don't have a real Mac to create them.
Probably the most important thing you could do to ensure data integrity
is to hunt down the -DCRLF entry in afpd's Makefile and remove it! (then
recompile and install) Once -DCRLF is removed netatalk will never alter
the contents of a file. But with it, netatalk may take liberties on
files of type TEXT -- writes to HD replacing \r with \n's, serves to
Macs with \n's changed to \r's. That *could* be a nice feature but
sometimes it will burn you. Acrobat files are sometimes of type TEXT
when they are not really. Once the damage is done you can't repair the
file without guessing.
The other concern is that you don't want to lose the contents of
.AppleDouble/ as possibly half of your data is stored there. If a Mac
set the Type/Creator of a file on your server then that information is
in the .AppleDouble directory along with the file's resource fork.
Having scanned the past year's archive of this list today my head is
rolling. There were a number of postings on reaping unneeded files from
.AppleDouble/ as when somebody deletes the data-fork side from Unix the
resource-fork side in .AppleDouble remains forever.
-- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@nospam.hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.
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