Subject: Re: netatalk in production environments....(Netware and Stuff...)
From: Matthew Geier (matthew@arts.usyd.edu.au)
Date: Tue Jun 06 2000 - 19:37:11 EDT
This thread has seen one interesting side effect, more traffic in this
list than I have seen for some time.
Even so, NetAtalk to me appears to be dying a slow death. Compared to
Samba, NetAtalk is already dead.
Only one person is now working on the code, and they obviously have a
day job and other things to do.
NetAtalk it self appears to be suffering from implementing the spec and
not what really happens. While its amazing that it works as well as it
does, it does appear to have been written of a protocol spec document
and not sniff of the protocol. The Samba people found losts of cases
where the CIFS spec was vague or wrong and found the 'correct' behaviour
with tcpdump. :-). I can only assume Apple's documentation is lots
better than Microsoft's and that Asun can implement the documents well.
In the experiments ive done so far, in my effors to get a large
university faculty to move to a server based environment instead of
waisting a lot of time trying to retrospect 500+ workstations. (It
doesn't scale at all).
So far i've found that attempting to copy large amounts of data from an
8.6 and 9.0.x mac when there is a 'slow' link between the server and the
client (ie 100Mb ISL trunks) or 155mb ATM) the client machine locks up.
This does not happen when the machine is in the same building, thus has
100mb clear (in the switch fabric) to the server.
We also have an ASIP 6.2 server. Not only does the client not lock up,
its faster. A 266Mhz G3 with ASIP 6.3, and standard SCSI is faster than
a dual PIII 600 linux/netAtalk server with onboard 2940UW and UW scsi
drives....
I could provide ethernet captures of the transactions with each server
if I though any one would be able to do something with the information.
More than once in the past I provided captures to the Samba team and
assited in tracking down obscure bugs...
-- Matthew Geier matthew@arts.usyd.edu.au Arts IT Unit +61 2 9351 4713 Sydney University
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Wed Jan 17 2001 - 14:30:58 EST