Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] Netatalk and Netapps?
From: Casey Bisson (cbisson@oz.plymouth.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 31 1999 - 15:43:16 EST
I have been running netatalk (many versions, now asun's 2.1.3) on FreeBSD (many versions,
now 3.1) with a NetApp F230, doing just what I think you're hoping to. We have about 250
Macs in student clusters and on staff/faculty desktops.
I haven't worried to much about locking (it hasn't been a problem).
We have, however, decided not to use the NetApp's SMB support, and use an intermediary
server just as with netatalk. That decision was based on security concerns: because of the
amount and variety of data on the NetApp and the unknown stability of it's networking
stack. We created a "backside" or "storage area network" with a 100baseT switch and second
100baseT ethernet in all servers. The only traffic on that backside net was NIS or NFS
among the servers. This way, the NetApp only saw traffic from a limited set of machines,
and a malicious user would need to gain root (or exploit in some other way) on those
servers to send traffic to the NetApp.
Casey Bisson
Plymouth State College
bethany-netatalk@wcug.wwu.edu wrote:
> >From what I see in the afpd.8 man page, it does not look like netatalk
> plays "nicely" with NFS:
> AFP byte-range locking is not implemented. afpd gives
> proper responses, but does no actual locking. Moreover,
> synchronization locks use the flock(2) interface. This
> interface is not usually ``NFS-aware''.
>
> Is that the right conclusion to come to? In particular I was thinking of
> solving our "make disk space available through SMB and AFP" desires with a
> NetApp. Assuming the NetApp can do SMB itself and also export the
> disks over NFS to another machine running Netatalk which would do
> the AFP work. (Oh, that AFP were important enough for netapp to support
> natively...)
>
> But from the quote above, I'm guessing that this would be impossible.
> Please confirm or deny my thoughts. Thanks,
> bjh
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Sat Dec 18 1999 - 16:16:31 EST