Linux file server, Panther clients with lots of problems

juan.hernandez

juan.hernandez

Registered
Hi there...

As you can see, this is my first post to this list. Well, here's my problem: I'm a long time linux engineer and Unix supporter and I recently got a contract to migrate about 40 g4 to MacOS X from MacOS 9 and also to develop a solution in which they would have file serving and firewall/proxy services for those workstations. For the server I chose linux using Iptables/Squid and Netatalk and since there would be some Win clients, I also installed Samba in that Linux server. I have /home/user for each user and a /home/public where all users have 770 access (group access) thru netatalk. Since this is a huge design company, I configured a raid for them.
My problem starts when the users started copying data to the file server using panther thru appletalk, somehow the files get changed and the data is all screwed up. This only happens on X because Netaltalk worked perfectly with MacOS 9 -because I backed up all the data in the file server to be able to upgrade from 9 to panther-. I found that the first problem was that the designers used "/" for names and it confuses linux from panther but, MacOS 9 changes "/" for ":" which work perfectly for any UNIX system. After this, I still have this problem, all the names and files properties get all screwed. I also changed from AppleTalk to SMB or NFS and the problem persists. I'd say it's MacOS related because I have made lots of tests with other operationg systems (9.2.2, Windows and Linux) and all three protocols worked perfectly.

Has Anybody seen anything similar?? any solutions? I need to give them a reliable file serving solution and somehow panther is not working for them.

Thanx a lot
Juan
 
Are you using the latest version of netatalk? (Current is 1.6.4, beta is 2.0b1) Give them both a try and see which works the best for you.
 
nixgeek said:
Are you using the latest version of netatalk? (Current is 1.6.4, beta is 2.0b1) Give them both a try and see which works the best for you.
Click to expand...

Yes, I used both, they worked flawlessly with MacOs 9 but somehow when I upload anything from panther, it screwes everything up...

Thanx
Juan
 
I noticed one thing when I searched on that site for netatalk. I should have thought about this before. Could it be that the OS 9 machines were using HFS and not HFS+??

I noticed a post by someone saying that netatalk might not support HFS+ yet.
 
i would suggest using NFS instead of netatalk, i got a FreeBSD 5 box at home, which serves home dirs for a couple of macs, i also use NIS to distribute the login/password. it works great!

its all so seamless :)
 
Yup..

NFS export the partitions on the linux box, and have the Mac automount them.

You could also create an fstab file and use the niload utility to mount them, as well.

Doing this means that you have to setup the other usual files, such as the rhosts, hosts.equiv, passwd and hosts files, too, to make things run smoothly.

We have several Macs, Linux and IRIX boxes sharing files this way.

bob..
 
You said there were Windows boxes on this network too. I don't understand why you just wouldn't use Samba (as you did install it) and have MacOSX users mount their home dirs as you would on the Windows boxes.

Maybe I missed something...

Wow, try reading the whole post <me> and looking at the dayes I'm sure this have been fixed by now :) I'll just run away now...
 
So, if I understand rightly:
- when people make a file called "a/b", on a local disk, the OS converts the name to "a:b" (when you look at the file using unix utilities)
- if they're working with a remote share, it tries to make a file called "b" in a directory called "a". This is the same whether the share is netatalk, samba, or nfs

Weird.
 
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