[rytc]

I'm interested in how accurate this statement by my departments computer admin is. He's a total mac hater and I'm often amazed at how little he really knows. How much of what he is saying is true? BTW the main servers are Win2K running appleshare.

Quote:
Dear users,
the main file server is performing poorly at the moment for a predictable but
unavoidable reason. For some time the mac-users disks (mac-users and mac-
users2) which are the mac indexes of users and users2 have been giving
intermittant problems. The main reason for this is that the indexes for the
macintoshes old file system are getting too big.

Users2 now has around 500,000 file in 36,000 directories and users1 has 200,000
files in 17,000 directories. The old mac file system was not designed to
support such large file systems which is part of the reason OS X was introduced
for macintoshes. It takes the server around 30 minutes to rebuild the mac file
system each time there is a problem and with the large number of files the
problems are increasing.

The medium term solution is to move all macs to OS X and turn off applesharing
on the file server. In the short term we will have to struggle along with what
we have and hope the service is good enough for people on macs to cope.

Typically I have to reboot the server to re-establish the macintosh share. As
this is impractical to do while people are using the server it is normally done
before 8 am each morning.

Terry

[Camelot]

Well, he's partially right, and partially wrong.

For a start, by default, Mac OS X uses the exact same disk format as previous Mac versions (HFS+) so upgrading the users to Mac OS X is not going to make one iota of difference.

In addition to that, the Mac doesn't CARE about the file system in use on the other machine, as long as the server software that's actually handling the serving (in your case, Windows 2000 Server's Service for Macintosh) is following the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) specification.
The remote filesystem could be HFS+, NTFS (Windows), UFS (Unix), or anything else - it just doesn't matter.
At this level it is the SERVER's OS that matters more than the client.

That said, the number of files and folders listed is large, but not extreme. According to Apple KnowledgeBase article #24601 ( http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=24601 ), you can store more than 2 billion files in 32,767 folders.
The only place this might be a problem is if all your content is in one common folder at the top level, in which case you have 36,000 folders in the top folder, which might be a problem. If that's the case you should eliminate the top level folder and have multiple folders at the top level of the drive.

In short, you're unlikely to be running into the HFS+ file system limits. Upgrading the clients won't matter at all, it's the server that's at fault. Turning off AppleShare/Services for Macintosh is not going to solve the problem at all, unless the problem is in MS's implementation of AFP/HFS+, in which case it's still not the Mac's fault.

[rytc]

Interesting thanks.

I think he wants to upgrade the Macs so that he can turn off AFS and use SMB only, kinda shortsighted, large numbers of Macs in the dept. run OS 9 so this would screw them over.

To be honest, we get emails every week explaining why the servers aren't working, either its a "random" hardware fault or the Mac sharing is playing up.

Thanks Ry

[Camelot]

Originally posted by rytc:
Interesting thanks.

I think he wants to upgrade the Macs so that he can turn off AFS and use SMB only, kinda shortsighted, large numbers of Macs in the dept. run OS 9 so this would screw them over.

To be honest, we get emails every week explaining why the servers aren't working, either its a "random" hardware fault or the Mac sharing is playing up.

Thanks Ry

I don't think switching from AFP to SMB is going to solve your problem, at least not if the admin's theory of the problem is correct.

All he's changing here is the protocol used to access the files. The disk itself will still be NTFS based (just like it is now).

Thinking about this a little more, if you have that many files, you might be bashing up against WINDOWS' pathname limit.

On Windows (including NTFS), a pathname can not exceeed 260 characters - that's the entire pathname, including drive, directory names and filename extension.

If you're storing half a million files in 36,000 directories, you might be bashing your head against that limit. In which case the problem is certainly not Mac-based, and switching to SMB won't make any difference at all.

Of course, on the other hand, if moving to Mac OS X means everyone has to get shiny new MDD G4's, well.. that's not so bad, is it?

[rytc]

Originally posted by Camelot:
I don't think switching from AFP to SMB is going to solve your problem, at least not if the admin's theory of the problem is correct.

All he's changing here is the protocol used to access the files. The disk itself will still be NTFS based (just like it is now).

Thinking about this a little more, if you have that many files, you might be bashing up against WINDOWS' pathname limit.

On Windows (including NTFS), a pathname can not exceeed 260 characters - that's the entire pathname, including drive, directory names and filename extension.

If you're storing half a million files in 36,000 directories, you might be bashing your head against that limit. In which case the problem is certainly not Mac-based, and switching to SMB won't make any difference at all.

Of course, on the other hand, if moving to Mac OS X means everyone has to get shiny new MDD G4's, well.. that's not so bad, is it?

Yea that'd be great, however I don't think the budget strectches that far!
I emailed him with this info so it'll be interesting so see his response. I'd say that he's just using MacOS as a scapegoat for his bad server admin/knowledge or lack thereof. As is often the case with people like him, he was shifted into the computer admin job by a "lateral promotion" out of another dept-they couldn't stand him either!.

Cheers ry

[Cipher13]

Wow. I think you need a new admin.