I have a small home network (3 Macs) with networked home directories.
I'm currently using a FreeBSD NFS server for fileserving. I'm
planning on adding a dual 2.5G PowerMac G5 and in the interests of
having the fastest workstation possible, I'd like to move the home
directories so that they're stored locally on the G5 hard drive and
using the G5 as the fileserver for the other Macs. (Network
fileserving overhead will be pretty small in my setup.)
So I'm now facing the same dilemma that originally forced me to choose
a FreeBSD server back when I first looked at this with OSXS 10.2,
namely that there is no good way of setting up network home directories
on Mac OS X Server so they can be also used as local home directories.
Does anyone have any thoughts or experiences with this situation?
Here are my options and issues with them:
AFP:
It's stateful so that when the server reboots (e.g. after applying
system updates), all the clients mounts are "hung" and the clients need
to reboot. At least this was the case with 10.2.
AFP uses a weird UNIX permissions and ownership remapping that I never
completely managed to figure out in 10.2. Only the user that is
logged into the console can see their files without their UNIX
permissions & ownership being remapped. The most aggravating aspects
of this is that I can't SSH into a client Mac unless I'm also logged
into the console as that user, and setting up UNIX groups to share
files between users doesn't behave consistently locally and remotely.
NFS with HFS+
Resource forks are not compatible between files saved locally and
files saved by NFS clients. NFS clients save resource forks in
AppleDouble format (with a ._ prefix), but local applications save them
as true HFS+ forks. This means that files saved by apps running on
the G5 can't be read by the same apps running on an NFS client and
vice-versa. It would be great to have an NFS option with HFS+
filesystems that would recognize files with a ._ prefix and map them to
true HFS+ resource forks.
NFS with UFS
Might solve the resource fork incompatibility, but from all reports
I've read, UFS is slow, buggy, and not recommended.
NFS on a separate FreeBSD PC.
None of the above problems; everything works as expected, but it's
slower than a local HDD.
Any thoughts? It still looks like my best bet is sticking with the
FreeBSD PC and upgrading it to gigabit ethernet.
