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Samba And Netatalk - Is There A Better Solution?
Traverser asks: "I'm looking for a solution that allows Windows and Apple users to share a file store. Samba works great for the Windows systems. Netatalk works great for the Apple users. But each solution has its own style of file locking on the server: which means that if the same file were opened under Netatalk and Samba at the same time, there is a chance the file would become corrupt and unusable. Putting Dave on the Macintosh provided further layers of troubles. The WindowsNT AppleTalk driver doesn't seem to like Netatalk. WebDAV seems like a good alternative, except the tools are not mature enough on the Macintosh side to put in a production enviorment. NFS seems like a better solution, except the price per client suggests moving towards a commercial solution. Novell has moved support of the Netware Macintosh client to ProSoft Engineering. The current Novell client is still buggy and there is no visible development for a new client. I hate to say it but I'm back to the Microsoft solution. I really hope I'm missing something..."
AFS + Netatalk is used in many places. You can compile Netatalk with AFS support.
I haven't tried it but it is described here.
There are also AFS clients for Windows, and Samba is supposedly "AFS-Aware."
It's worth a shot.
I second this. I have worked with quite a few Appleshare server products under Unix, VMS, NT and OS/2, and Helios kicked ass over all others. It is quite pricy though.
Incidentally, I don't know if anyone here has mentioned this but the netatalk project has recently been revived after years of stagnating at 1.4b2+asun. They're working on a 1.5 release - it's worth checking out to see if the Samba locking problem is fixed. I know that is an often-requested feature. See sourceforge.net/projects/netatalk
Some other *nix Appleshare solutions include PacerShare (forget what its called now - someone bought them i think), uShare, Syntax and CAP.
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