[plug] Mac OSX

[James Devenish]

In message <1076384305.15108.105.camel at sarge>
on Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 11:38:26AM +0800, Scott Middleton wrote:
> If you have a few Mac OSX and you want to connect them to a Linux Server
> what is the best way?
> 
> I know OSX supports SMB, I'd be surprised if it didn't support NFS and
> Linux supports netatalk. The question is which would be the easiest and
> the most robust? I'm inclined to use SaMBa because i know it well and i
> like it. Opinions!

Yep, Mac OS X comes with NFS client support, and other UNIX can act as
AFP servers via netatalk (stock Linux kernels usually come with
AppleTalk support, so netatalk will work out-of-the-box: but make sure
you use a 1.6.x version of netatalk). Note also that while netatalk
provides an AFP /server/, it does not provide an AFP /client/ (so you
can't mount Mac OS X volumes under Linux via netatalk -- unless v2
includes it or something). SMB and PAP printing should work, too.

If you already have SMB running on your Linux machine, then I guess you
would just keep using that. Be warned, however, that neither SMB nor NFS
carry the semantics or metadata of Mac OS X's default filesystem (HFS+).
I would guess that Mac users will find that such mounts will be visibly
unlike Mac OS X volumes. BUT, I can't say I've ever tried to use Mac OS
X with SMB/CIFS/NFS :-) Also, you may need to run the 'Directory Access'
programme on the Mac OS X machines to enable SMB-type network browsing
(I can't remember what its defaults are).

Mac OS X should offer automounting on reboot/login for all the above
protocols, too (which you can set up per-machine as root, or per-user
via AppleScript) -- but I haven't actually tried this yet :-)

In the end...I think your Mac users would thank you for using netatalk.
The downside of using netatalk with Debian is that (a) the woody version
/works/ in general *except* for Mac 'aliases' (and certain other uses of
directories -- the significance will depend on your users) (b) with all
the squabbles about OpenSSL, the sarge/sid packages for netatalk don't
include DHX login support (c) the sarge/sid versions require libdb4.1 or
libdb4.2. For multi-user use, I think the best user experience comes
from compiling netatalk yourself. So -> annoying. But, once you've got
some version of netatalk installed (even the woody version), it is
pretty easy to set up (should basically autoconfigure itself, and you
can then tweak it easily if you need to -- just read the docs in the
config files in /etc/netatalk).