Alternative to AFP – Netatalk?

[jpbuse]

I scanned the forums but haven’t seen a reason post about this topic.

Like most, I have a few xServes that I need to replace. These servers only handle OD and AFP… the rest of my services are handled on Linux machines. I haven’t been real impressed with the Mac OS X server software in quite some time. A quick test of Lion server seems to have the same issues of the past versions. I’m not interested in running a file server on the Mac Mini or a Mac Pro.

My thinking is to go a pure Linux environment (CentOS or Ubuntu). I would migrate OD over to OpenLDAP but I still need a solution for sharing AFP. It looks like netatalk is still being supported. Has anyone had recent experience with netatalk? What about SMB with mods?

We are a design/creative shop with all Macs. We run Adobe CS5 mainly. The clients are bound to the OD server but that is not a big deal. The only thing I am concerned about is a solid file server. To be honest, AFP on Mac OS hasn’t been all that great.

Would love to hear what others are running and how you are making the move off the xServe platform… and perhaps even OS X server itself.

Thanks!

[cloudmac]

Hello,

Does the platform need to be on AFP? It could be easy to use SMB with decent performance from Linux to OS X clients. I’m also seeing good performance over NFS. SMB seems to be the easiest however, since the drive “mounts on the desktop” of the client stations.

[Author]

Posts