[OpenIndiana-discuss] "OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns"

[James Relph]

That will require a better groomed Netatalk package & SMF manifest. Right
  now that's a slightly messy thing to set up.
  
This to some extent goes back to something I've been talking about recently.  The current version of netatalk (v3) is actually excellent on OI.  NetAFP added cross-protocol file locking with the native CIFS client and netatalk will use ZFS xattrs to store Mac xattrs.    The actual problem has turned out to be the Windows integration, because it's either:


-    Modify the AD schema or use IDMU (making changes to AD is really not popular in a lot of Windows environments)
-    Use ephemeral UIDs


NetAFP managed to get ephemeral UIDs working with netatalk, but then they saw an ephemeral UID change while a user was logged in (from the existing documentation that seems possible - but there appears to be no actual definitive documentation stating either way - which is another problem in itself).  This changing UID broke netatalk quite badly.


>From my point of view both Mac OS X and Linux have far better methods for integrating with Active Directory (without making changes to AD) - and the lack of that in OI is a big turn-off for a lot of Windows admins.  OI with netatalk is an awesome AFP server, but for ease-of-deployment the AD integration is a big hurdle, and I think that really needs looking at because AD is so common it's too big to be ignored (which is why Apple spent so much time with the AD plugin for OS X - which is frighteningly easy to setup).


James.