[Gluster-users] Gluster, Samba and MacOSX - possible solution!

[Dan Mons]

On 21 January 2014 03:07, Paul Robert Marino <prmarino1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Interesting I haven't worked with Netatalk in a decade but it always
> had some short comings essentially AFP is a mostly forgotten protocol
> I don't even think Apple is doing much development around it any more
> so nothing you are saying about it surprises me.

Netatalk (free/open source implementation of AFP) is in active
development.  Last major release was late October last year.

http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/

AFP is still in use (Apple still use it for Time Machine backups from
OSX Server).  But yes, it is an old protocol, but more importantly
makes some assumptions from days gone by.  As a result, it doesn't
scale particularly well, and is certainly no speed king.

> I do have a WARNING for users with Windows clients. Using this will
> help your Samba performance significantly but Windows applications
> especially ones written by Microsoft do very strange things with vfs
> alternate data streams.

Thanks for that.  I'll include it in my testing.

Currently we don't store Microsoft Office docs on Gluster.  That just
caused too many problems for users with the incredibly strange way
MSOffice deals with locking, temporary files and renaming of temporary
files.  All of these things added to NFS breakages (just look at what
Office spews all over a disk when you open a file, edit it and save
it).

>From a security perspective, our Office docs don't belong with our
production data anyway, as most of the contents are confidential
client notes.  As such, we put them on different non-Gluster storage,
and the relevant folks get access.  Gluster for us is still all
project (multimedia) stuff, for which it excels (no pun intended).

In general we're also reducing our reliance on Windows, as it's lack
of POSIX compliance breaks our workflow.  We're still majority Linux
with a growing number of Mac workstations for end users.  Windows jobs
are consider "legacy", and as they wrap up we bump users on to a
different OS when new projects start.

-Dan