Subject: [netatalk-admins] Slightly Off-Topic: MacOS as server or Linux?

From: Oliver Wrede <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 1997 22:07:43 +0100

Hello,

my question ist slightly off-topic, but I think here are many
people who can answer with all of their experience. So excuse
me please.

I need an advice.

We are an educational institution with 300-400 users and
aprox. 30-50 client machines (mostly Macintosh) We have to
update our server infrastructure soon. Of course we want
to get as much features and benefit we can out of the
investment we can make.

We have a Mac-only LAN (just 4-5 Windows NT machines for
doing CAD and 3D stuff) Our current main Internet-Server
is a Linux box with only few diskspace, but doing all
the tricks you can want.

Right now, we have the problem with UNIX, that there are only
two, who can administer this machine. We are considering
to hire somone full-time to do the administration (whether
server platform is MacOS, Rhapsody, Linux or NT is yet
to be decided, but we want that person to be able to handle
it)

My current opinion is, that if there is someone, who can
handle the Linux box, we can use the money to buy a bulk
Intel machine with huge diskspace (mybe a RAID disk) and
best-of backup devices.

Is there any argument against this? Should we better buy
a MacOS machine as server and wait for Rhapsody? Could
we plan to switch to Rhapsody on the intel machine later?

What would you do with if you had - say  - $30,000 left
to invest?

Oliver

---
. Oliver Wrede . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [email-masked] .
. tel. +49 2203 913 200 .  office +49 221 9522 601  . fax +49 221 9522 605 .
. School of Design, University of Applied Science, Cologne . . . . . . . . .
. http://www.ds.fh-koeln.de/~owrede/ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

---

From: Hannu Krosing <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Nov 1997 15:30:14 +0200

> Intel machine with huge diskspace (mybe a RAID disk) and

As long as you don't buy 3com cards with it.

I had to go back to NT server after spending a whole week trying to
get netatalk with IP (from ftp://ftp.u.washington.edu/pub/user-supported/asun/)
running at 100Mb/s (it ran fine with 10Mb/s, about 1.5 times faster than NT
without
IP support and more than twice as fast as plain ethertalk between Mac boxes.
We could have used it at 10 Mb/s and still be better off than we are now but
we had already bought a 100Mb/s hub and our 10Mb/s hub was full ;(

Now we get throughput of about 900kb/sek from appletalk and NT server running
100Mb/s
while it used to be over 1000 using IP /linux/10Mb/s. And it was much snappier
too - better
reaction times when clicking a disk icon and so on.

As I found out later by joining the linux-vortex-bug mailing list, there are
severe
problems with 3com 100Mb/s cards after merging the drivers.

There are reports that DEC Tulip based cards (for example from D-Link) are
rock-stable and fast.
I'm going toi give it another try when I have received mine.

I did not suspect the cards at first, as I had had very good experience with
them from the
times when the driver was a separate one called boomerang.

> we plan to switch to Rhapsody on the intel machine later?

Waiting is always a safe plan ;)

> What would you do with if you had - say  - $30,000 left

It's way too much <grin>

Hannu

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From: Jeff Wiegley <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 1997 10:29:26 -0800

The company I worked with went with an Intel/Linux platform for all
our file sharing plans and we haven't looked back.  We've been running
problem free for 14 days now. Haven't had to reboot the machine or
restart the file sharing servers netatalk or samba except to add
printers.

The only reason we rebooted the machine 14 days ago was to recompile
a kernel and to recompile/add proper directory permission handling in
netatalk.

So now the bad news...

Don't bet on the DEC tulip cards.  They are *great* cards and they
seem to work perfectly *except* with netatalk. Even Donald Beckers
newest tulip drivers do not seem to work correctly with netatalk.

I had kernel v2.0.29 + ISS patches + donald newest tulip driver and
nbplkup would show *only* the netatalkk servers it would not see
all the other mac object on the network.

Currently we have no fix for this except to use the DEC-4X5 driver;
a solution I am not very happy with because I'm sure this driver
is lame compared to the tulip driver for operating tulip cards.

oh yea... the tulip.c driver only seemed to fail for us on the
21140chip cards (the 10/100 cards) the 21040(10base-T) card I have
in another machine works fine with netatalk and the latest tulip
drivers.

ifconfig ... allmulti
or
ifconfig ... multicast

does not fix the problem either.

If anybody has a fix for the tulip 10/100 cards and netatalk I'ld
love to hear it.

- Jeff

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From: Matt Isleb <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 1997 15:55:48 -0600 (CST)

> > problems with 3com 100Mb/s cards after merging the drivers.

Hmm interesting... I just trashed a tulip card for a 3c905 card.  I was
having problems with the tulip card (SMC 9332DST 10/100). It kept dropping
down to 10Mbit and other strange things. So I put in a 3c905 and it SEEMS
to be working great. Not only does it run consistantly at 100Mbit but it
auto-detected full duplex. More than i could ever get from the tulip
card.  I believe the 3c905 is the "Boomerang" model. I run kernel 2.0.32.
Are their any problems I should look forward to? Related to netatalk of
course :)

Matt

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From: Nicolai Langfeldt <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 11:45:06 +0100

> restart the file sharing servers netatalk or samba except to add
...
> newest tulip drivers do not seem to work correctly with netatalk
...

This is ...interesting.

I'm running netatalk on a machine with a 21140 card at 10Mbps.  Works
great. Stock 2.0.31 kernel at the moment (_no_ patches).

Is it at 100Mbps it breaks down?

Another interesting thing, People using boomerang (3com 10/100) cards
should be cautious about using the new 'unified' 3com driver.

If my box breaks at 100Mbps I'm going to try Intel Etherexpress Pro.
It appears it has the potential to be faster than tulips due to
alignment flexibility (apparently the typical packet payload start
can be aligned to 4byte boundrary, instead of the header which the
tulip dictates)

Nicolai

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From: Jeff Wiegley <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 12:51:18 -0800

> can be aligned to 4byte boundrary, instead of the header which the

No, mine breaks at 10Mbps we don't have any 100Mbps capable routers
around here :-(

Well, As I said, it doesn't really "break" like the 3Com cards do.
The network still seems to run perfectly, no errors fast response.
its just that netatalk isn't able to see any other appletalk devices
except those registered by the netatalk server itself. (nbplkup only
shows the netatalk server objects and nothing else)

but unix networking and samba run fine.

- Jeff

---

From: Andrew Solmssen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Nov 1997 13:52:50 -0800 (PST)

I'm having a similar problem - I have a Red Hat 4.2 machine with netatalk
1.4b2 with the umich patches.The nbplkup program shows only those names
registered by the linux box, but I can see and login to the afpd server
just fine from the macs.  Pap seems unable to find an appletalk printer in
the local zone.  I have a 3C905 with 0.46B vortex driver from Donald
Becker.  I can do an nbplkup on the mac with interpoll or trawl and see
the linux box, but the linux box can't see anyone else.  I'm going to try
moving to the larger net range that solved my problem before - here's my
current atalkd.conf:

eth0 -phase 2 -net 10000 -addr 10000.141 -zone "San Diego ET"

---- Andrew