Snow Leopard bug connecting to AFP on Netware

[Paul R. Coen]

There's a bug in Snow Leopard that prevents mounting volumes via AFP on Netware and OES Linux. Detailed information can be found here. The bug was present in earlier builds of Snow Leopard, but wasn't fixed in the final release. This bug prevents Apple users with Snow Leopard from mounting the users, depts, etc. volumes via AFP. SMB/CIFS still works.

If you want to connect to the Netware volumes via AFP, do not upgrade to Snow Leopard at this time. If you already have, or you can't wait for some reason, you'll have to use SMB/CIFS to connect instead.

Novell is talking about releasing a workaround, but it is unlikely that we'll be able to use it. We're currently using Netware 6.5 SP7 plus patches, and Novell is planning to release the patch for Netware 6.5 SP8. We will not be upgrading to SP8 at this time. We have a stable cluster configuration, and we're aware of other sites having some issues with clusters running Netware 6.5 SP8. Unless Novell backports the fix to SP7, Apple users will have to wait on Apple fixing the bug on their end. We hope to move from Netware to OES Linux next summer, so we would ideally leave the file server infrastructure the way it is until then. If Novell does release a version of the fix for Netware 6.5 SP7, we will install it.

[Naveen Akkapeddi]

Does anybody even use AFP anymore?
I would think SMB/CIFS is sufficient.

[Paul R. Coen]

Some folks do - as far as I know, we have a few people who have been using it.

[E. Axel Larsson]

Originally Posted by Naveen Akkapeddi

Does anybody even use AFP anymore?
I would think SMB/CIFS is sufficient.

It's more of an issue with legacy Mac applications that make heavy use of what are known as "resource forks". Resources forks are still used today, but for most document types (i.e. a Word, Excel, or Powerpoint file) it's less critical if you loose the fork. You might loose a custom icon for the file for instance, but the data is intact.

The resource forks can still be stored on volumes accessed via CIFS, but the Mac stores that data in a small sidecar file in each folder. Whereas with AFP, it is handled internally in the filesystem.

The other Mac-ism you loose with CIFS/SMB instead of AFP is file type and creator codes which is the native mechanism a Mac uses to figure out which application should open a file. Mac OS X knows how to use file extensions though, so it is not really an issue anymore.

We have opened an incident (accessible here) in our new issue management system (announcement about that forthcoming) to track any progress on this bug.

[John D. Muccigrosso]

So are people using Snow Leopard successfully then? I was going to upgrade, but can wait.

[E. Axel Larsson]

Originally Posted by John D. Muccigrosso

So are people using Snow Leopard successfully then? I was going to upgrade, but can wait.

So far so good it seems with the one person down here who's tried it. I am getting mine later this week and will be doing some informal testing as well.

We have definitely confirmed the AFP problem however. CIFS should work fine as a substitute.

[Philip Wilson]

This bug is corrected in the 10.6.2 update. Just tested it myself. More detail and update instructions can be found here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3874

[John D. Muccigrosso]

Glad it's fixed.

BTW, the issue of Apple dropping creator code support is getting some play around the Mac sites lately.