BS"D
Our experience with an Xserve-XRAID (10.3.x) as an NFS file server
for a mix of Linux and Mac clients was "less than satisfactory", to
put it politely. In fact, we gave back the Xserve and RAID for a
full refund (that was a precondition of purchase), and got a Linux
file server.
With a Linux based NFS server, if the server goes down, the Linux
clients can wait a few minutes until the server is available again
and continue on as before. The OSX server, however, could not re-
establish contact with hanging clients after a reboot, and one had to
reboot all the clients.
From the client side, I work on a dual processor G5 running 10.4.11
as a client to the Linux server; if there is any glitch in the
network, and my client loses contact with the Linux server, I usually
cannot continue working without rebooting the Mac, while the Linux
clients show no issues.
Unless major changes have taken place in the OSX NFS system (which
Bill Scott seems to think), I couldn't recommend it.
If you have only Macs, then perhaps an Xserve system based on AFP
would be fine.
There are, of course, alternatives these days in the Unix world to
NFS, in the form of other distributed file systems, but I have no
experience with these. Thus you could connect your workstations to
your server(s) via iSCSI, and eliminate NFS. If anybody has any
experience with this, I would be interested in hearing about it.
Thanks
Harry
Hi all,
With all the talk about Mac OS X, I've not heard much mention about
OS X Server and networking Macs together. Is anyone using the 10.5
server and LDAP to centrally house user directories on a RAID
connected to a Mac server for example?
We had this setup running with 10.4, but we now seem to have issues
getting the server 10.5 to export the RAID to the clients via NFS.
I know NSF is old, but our network is behind a firewall and it has
worked well for us. It seem if you don't set things up the way
Apple recommends (using AFP for example), things can get difficult...
It's quite possible that we are missing something during the setup,
but frankly I'm surprised at how difficult it has been to work with
OS X server.
I would be happy to hear about other people's experience with OS X
server 10.5. Perhaps a website describing OS X server for
crystallographic computing/networking would be nice if it doesn't
exist already.
Cheers,
Brian
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Harry M. Greenblatt
Associate Staff Scientist
Dept of Structural Biology [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Weizmann Institute of Science Phone: 972-8-934-3625
Rehovot, 76100 Facsimile: 972-8-934-4159
Israel
