One of the biggest announcements from Apple with OS X Mavericks was not part of the WWDC 2013 keynote. Instead, it is buried deep in a technical document on Apple's site. This is the announcement that the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) is being deprecated in favor of Server Message Block version 2 (SMB2).
Apple has posted a document highlighting the core technologies of OS X Mavericks, which includes some changes from Mountain Lion. Among the new features is a change to the default file sharing protocol from AFP to SMB2. OS X has long supported SMB, but AFP has remained the default.
Let's face it, OS X makes a great stable client platform but the server components do not scale well. That is probably why most big companies rely on some other component to have the infrastructure and then us, the Mac admins, spend a lot of time on the integration.
If you need to add permissions to files or folders beyond User, Group or Other, then ACLs are the answer. You can have super fine control over files and folders with ACLs and assign them based upon any number of users and groups.
Rich Trouton and Peter Bukowinski ran into an odd issue on some of their machines. They would time out while trying to connect to a SMB or AFP share with a known good Username/Pass. The problem? iDisk. The machines would try to connect to iDisk even if the share was an internal-only fileshare.
The Situation: You have a Mac OS X Server with network home directories and disk quotas enabled. The Problem: The Mac OS Finder on client machines does not have very good support for warning users they are approaching their file quota limit.
GroupLogic is working to bridge the gap between corporate mass archival solutions and Mac OS X. With a new product called ArchiveConnect, the makers of Extreme Z-IP now have a product that provides the ability to fully integrate CommVault's Simpana.
In Mac OS X 10.2.2 journaling was added to the Mac OS X Extended file system (I first read about it here on afp548). Journaling introduced a lot of great stuff, most notably improved resiliency to crashing.
Ed. Note: This is interesting as otherwise you'll always be visible over WINS/NetBIOS whether you're actually sharing via SMB or not. Finally I believe I found the magic command to disable WINS on Leopard to stop it from showing on a Windows network.
I've been doing some pretty intensive research down here with iSCSI setups of various kinds. This market segment was a little rough a year ago...but it's much better now.
