Subject: [netatalk-admins] Two big problems: Contention and Symbolic Links
From: Steve Frampton (frampton@alcdsb.on.ca)
Date: Thu Apr 29 1999 - 12:09:48 EDT
Hello:
I am running netatalk-1.4b2+asun2.1.3-4 on a Red Hat 5.2 system (kernel
level 2.2.4).
I posted a message back in February [entitled, "Strange problems with
Netatalk (AppleTalk)..."] describing some problems I have been having with
getting Netatalk working with "At Ease". Although I did receive lots of
helpful advice, I wasn't able to resolve the problem, and went on to other
things.
I went back to look at the problems again today, and believe I can
describe the problems in greater detail than I could before. Basically,
there *appears* to be two big problems with Netatalk that is preventing me
from getting this to work:
- No support for symbolic links
- File contention when more than 1 machine tries to access file(s)
while logged in as the same user name.
Basically, At Ease stores user data, documents, etc. under one user
account (I've called this "admin"). It is then possible to have the Macs
load this information directly from the server. If I turn on a Mac, this
works fantastic!
The problem occurs when more than one Mac tries to access the server data
at one time. They hang there, completing one information request at a
time (for 20 macs, there can be *LOOOOONG* waits!). Worse yet, this
process may even deadlock, which means sometimes one or more Mac may hang
completely.
I wanted to see if I could resolve this problem, so as a test, I took two
Macs and created a 2nd user called "admin2". I then copied everything
from /home/admin to /home/admin2, set ownership, and then configured the
2nd Mac to load At Ease information from the 2nd user.
Guess what!? No more contention! (As expected).
Okay, so then I thought I could simply create one account per Mac, and
then somehow point their At Ease data to the original "admin" files
(obviously I don't have the space to store 20x the setup files, not to
mention the problems of users having different "Documents" folders on each
Mac!). I tried this in two ways:
- Point admin2's home directory to /home/admin, set permissions
on /home/admin and everything below to 'g+rwx', and put 'admin2' in the
/etc/group file as part of admin's group.
(that didn't work)
- Point admin2's home directory *back* to /home/admin2, and this time set
symlinks from "/home/admin/At Ease Items", "/home/admin/Documents", etc.
to equivalent names in /home/admin2. Set ownership to admin2.
That *also* doesn't work.
Therefore, it would appear that in order for my problems to be resolved,
one or both symlink support as well as allowing concurrent file access
from different machines logged on as the same user, will need to be added
to Netatalk.
--------------< LINUX: The choice of a GNU generation. >--------------
Steve Frampton <3srf@qlink.queensu.ca> http://qlink.queensu.ca/~3srf
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Sat Dec 18 1999 - 16:16:39 EST