Subject: Re: Netatalk and aliases
From: Aaron Levitt (alevitt@navis.com)
Date: Thu Jun 22 2000 - 11:56:37 EDT
Greets everyone-
Just thought I would pass on some info from the information I have gathered and the testing I have done in the last few days. I started this thread (although there have been a couple others on this subject) and I really appreciate all the info I received from you all. It was a great help.
My original set up was on a red hat 6.1 (kernel 2.2.13-0.13) using netatalk netatalk-1.4b2+asun2.1.3 (which I believe is the latest non-test package). It is configured using mostly defaults. Both atalkd ("classic appletalk server") and afpd ("appletalk over TCP/IP" or Appleshare IP server) running. I encountered a couple problems that most people seem to have had as well. The main problem that was making me unsure about rolling this out to my company being that aliases created on the share were pretty unreliable.
On a new server we just set up, I decided that based on the great emails I received from the list, I would try out the latest test that Adrian was working on (thanx for the forward Jonathan!). I installed pre-asun2.1.4-39_test on a box running red hat 6.1 as well (with an OEM'ed 2.2.14 kernel). I am pleased to report that all of the problems I had with the older version of netatalk have gone away. I tested it out by creating aliases from MacOS8.1, 8.5, 8.6 and 9.0.x and then trying out the aliases on the various machines as well. It all seems to work great. Also, the newer version allows configuration from a few .conf files that weren't available in the earlier release, giving much more flexibility and personalization. The connections seem faster and more resilient as well.
To be completely honest, the test is still a bit incomplete due to the fact we are waiting on the hardware vendor to figure out what we have to do to upgrade our kernel without losing support for our hardware. This means that we don't currently have appletalk compiled into the kernel, thereby not allowing the atalkd (classic appleshare server) to run. So, the results of the tests are only from the afpd server. The only downside to the way it is set up now, is it isn't browseable from the chooser on the mac side (you have to enter the ip address/hostname to mount the share). We are continuing to deal with the vender and may still compile appletalk into the kernel but I'm not sure that one advantage is worth the hassle.
However, I would really be interested in knowing if using atalkd also might re-introduce the aliases problem or any other problems. Has anyone else used 39_test yet?? I am interested in comparing results if anyone has it up and running yet, as we are looking to roll this out company-wide in the next couple weeks.
Sorry for such a long mail, but again I wanted to give back to the number of people that responded and offered suggestions. I hope this information helps out some other people as well. BTW, if anyone is interested in trying it out that may have missed the earlier mail that was forwarded to me.. it is available at ftp://ftp.cobaltnet.com/pub/users/asun/testing/pre-asun2.1.4-38_test.tar.gz.
-Aaron
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Aaron Levitt 1616 Franklin Street
Systems Administrator Oakland, CA 94612
Navis LLC Tel: 510-763-5715
http://www.navis.com Fax: 510-763-2516
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