On Thu, 2009-11-26 at 09:40 -0800, Keith Keller wrote:
On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 10:14:56AM -0700, Craig White wrote:
NFS mounts for Linux users Samba for Windows users Netatalk for Macintosh clients
Wow, I didn't even know netatalk was still around! How does it compare to SMB on OS X clients? I'm thinking that, unless you have a pressing need for some particular netatalk option, that using Samba for those clients as well simplifies admin on the backend. IOW, what are the scenarios where netatalk is either strongly preferred or required over Samba?
---- I don't recall timing checks between AFP (netatalk) and SMB (samba) but I do recall that AFP was light years faster than NFS on the Macs when using the Finder (but similar speeds from terminal transfers). I gathered that there was a bunch of latency from copying files using Finder operations on NFS mounts.
Advantages of using Netatalk instead of Samba for Macintosh clients?
- File naming... Mac users don't have to follow Windows rules for filenames
- Spotlight searches (finally fixed I think in OSX 10.5.x)
- Dual resource fork support
- A lot less objections/critiques from Macintosh users
I didn't find it to be a whole lot of extra administrative effort to implement. Obviously you have to compile netatalk, setup the shares, etc. but I use the same directories, the same uid's/gid's etc. and so it is indifferent as to which networking protocol is used to access (NFS/SMB/AFP).
Craig