i've got a 75 user licencse for Syntax TotalNet. We run it on an HA pair
of Sun Enterprise 250 servers, and use only the AppleShare services.
plusses:
their support folks are easily accessible and very helpful
the software has ultimately proved very reliable, current uptime is 80+
days.
it's very fast
aliases work
administration is essentially zero, in my experience, there's a gooey
web-browser thing if you hate the command-line.
minusses:
-the support staff don't always understand HA
-the support staff don't always understand appleshare issues (ie that afp
connections are stateful and restarting services disconnects everyone)
-it's a little cpu-hungry
-finder windows don't 'refresh' automatically* if another user copies a
file onto a server volume -- windoze users accept this, but mac folks
need to be told about 1,000 times that they need to close & re-open
windows to see changes.
-expensive
-restoring files and getting the finder attributes (type & creator) is
hit or miss, because the resource forks are tied to the inode (!!) rather
than the file name. there's a utility provided to work around this, but
it's far from 100%.
-there are weird limitations to the 'tncp' and 'tncp' utilities, like you
can't tnmv across volumes, for whatever reason.
* is this or is this not true of all unix-based afp servers?
