AFP Out Of Date In OS X Lion

sphardy wrote:
Neither has any other vendor guaranteed every model of NAS they produce will have upgraded AFP support for Lion

No, of course. But I wasn't commenting about general policies, just considering probabilities - it sounds like NV+ maybe reaching point where it is no longer going to be updated, which would have implications for what we do.

Regarding your other points - I'm not sure that it is always clear that Open Source provides a better solution than commercial software, nor am I convinced that commercial organisations relying on open source solutions to provide key features within their products is always in the customer's best interests. It is not obvious, for example, that the general solutions being promoted by Netatalk's commercial bits (industrial scale AFP solutions for big servers) are likely to inspire development of code that runs well on stripped down low power linux boxes and does just enough to support AFP over a small network. But if Netatalk project doesn't deliver the necessary code, potentially a raft of products will become unusable. Won't be Netatalk projects' fault if that happens, but a big headache for many all the same.

And for the avoidance of doubt (and to hopefully stop more statements of the obvious) I understand we're talking about issues with pre-release software etc. etc. One point of pre-release software is to give opportunities to work out issues that need to be fixed before the stuff is released. So some discussion about these issues needs to happen somehow (without infringing NDAs etc.). But of course YMMV

glawrie wrote:
I'm not sure that it is always clear that Open Source provides a better solution than commercial software

I never claimed that

after using the AFP patch posted here (LionAFPd_2.1.3-rns-0.1.2.bin) for several days, i've had to remove it from my ReadyNAS NV+. Other 10.6 machines on the network were affected negatively by the update. While initial connections to the share did take longer as anticipated (and described by others), my media machines were unable to reliably stream video over the AFP share (in a huge variety of formats) without causing the video stream to stutter or halt every few minutes. Any ideas guys?

Sure. The code you were using is spiced with lots of debug code. That's why it's way slower than it would normally be. The main intention for the patch was to test functionality with Lion, not usage in a production environment.

-Stefan

ahhh, somehow i missed that. I'm disabling the patch for now, and wont roll out the lion preview to any more machines just yet. Thanks for the info!

WhoCares? wrote:
Ok, here we go: LionAFPd_2.1.3-rns-0.1.2.bin Wfm,ymmv. Use at your own risk ;) After installation make sure to manually restart the AFP service using Frontview: "Services" -> "Protocols". Just disable and when finished re-enable. That's it. Same goes for de-installation of the add-on. -Stefan

Thank you for your work!
Before installing I wanted to ask, how significantly does this addon/update affect performance?
I have a spare (older) MacBook running the Lion Developer Preview, it is not crucial however to access the NAS from it. So if this netatalk update uses significantly more CPU, I'd rather wait until my main MacBook is updated to Lion (after it comes out) - and then see if the situation changes.

Connection times are noticeably longer, but otherwise performance not noticeably affected. But if running, TM support breaks for all clients (i.e. it doesn't work for Lion either with or without, but with, Snow Leopard clients can't do TM either).

Well for Lion you'd need Netatalk 2.2 anyway to do Time Machine. As for AFP things running much slower with debug code in there is to be expected.

Thanks for the answers =)
For TimeMachine I use an external HDD connected to my AirPort Extreme via USB (being on the safe side regarding protocol issues), so that wouldn't be a problem.
But if this update will impair AFP performance, I'll use NFS with Lion for the time being.

With Lion set for release in July, updated Netatalk is becoming more important. I expect that if there isn't a firmware update with updated Netatalk before Lion is released to the public, a lot of users will update to Lion and then wonder why AFP (on Sparc) and Time Machine (both Sparc and x86) doesn't work and open support cases. A lot of users don't read the forum, so wouldn't know about these issues before they update to Lion.

I know there isn't a Netatalk 2.2 production release yet, but hopefully there will be a production release of it in time for it to be added at least in a public beta firmware for x86.