Appleshare IP 6

Steve Hyman(steveh[at]practech.com)
Wed, 1 Jul 1998 14:18:52 -0400

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I've been beta testing Appleshare IP 6 and so far I *LOVE* it. Some
noteworthy features:
* connect from Mac OS (AFP) and Windows (SMB) machines with full support
for long filenames (up to 31 on the Mac, of course, and without the many
characters Windows doesn't allow, like /)
* connect via TCP/IP in the Mac Chooser
* connect via ftp
* IMAP mail server, web server (anonymous or password-protected sites),
ftp server (anonymous or passwords), an improved print server (with
TCP/IP support), and a Domain Name Server.

I have used the server with both Windows 95 and Windows NT, and the
speed seems similar to, or better than, a dedicated Windows NT 3.51
server. The Mac it suns on is a Power Mac 8600/250 with 64MB of RAM
running Mac OS 8.1.
One problem has to do with quirks in Windows. To connect in Windows 95,
you must be logged in as the username assigned to you on the server.
Otherwise, it requires a password but does not allow you to specify a
username and the login fails. In Windows NT, you can log in with a
username and password, but it seems to automatically attempt to connect
as a GUEST first, so if you have guest access enabled for SMB, you never
see a login screen, and will be unable to access your private
directories.
I have been running it for several weeks without a server-related crash.
(I had one crash starting it up and one deleting a user, neither of
which I was able to replicate, and neither of which was related to the
day-to-day operations of the server.) Overall, reliability has been
excellent-for a beta, phenomenal. I have not had the opportunity to
really stress-test it, however; so far the users I created accounts for
have used it only casually.
I have requested a G3 server with a full version of ASIP6 when it
becomes available (not that I expect to get it!) and believe this to be
an easy-to-use, easy-to-administer, and surprising robust solution for
anyone needing to share files between a Mac and a PC on ethernet. The
only reason I see to go with NT server would be:
* you need more than 250 simultaneous connections. This is not critical
on the web server side ("simultaneous connections" is almost meaningless
in that context) but would be a limit for file sharing at very large
sites. (You can define 4096 users but only 250 can connect at once.)
* you need one of the NT-specific services, like RAS or a domain
controller.

In my testing, Windows services on an Appleshare server works better
than Macintosh services on an NT server. If you'd like to try the web
server, I threw a page up there and made it world-readable:
<http://hdshare.cc.umb.edu/~adams/nba-wwf.html>

--
Peter C.S. Adams <mailto:peter.adams@umb.edu> Computing Services, UMass
Boston (617) 287-5263 Mac OS: Year 2000 compliant since 1983!



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