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High Sierra broke AFP searching on our server
- dschuetz 9y agoI wonder why there still isn't a company making highest quality products like Apple once did, while not being a total dick about customer support? The machine seemed to work fine, despite its age. Why this smugness "Why don't you upgrade to/buy a newer inferior more expensive product which doesn't suit your needs at all?"? Is a product obsolete as soon there is a newer product? Where is the line between products which provide infrastructure services and interchangeable consumer products?
- idorube 9y agoI agree, as a video archivist, we support a lot of technologies that are much older than most computer systems. e.g. uMatic, half inch tape, BetaSP, Film etc. Albeit daunting, there is a slower decline in support for these machines.
- eastWestMath 9y agoSomeone else pointed out that Apple announced the deprecation of AFP 4 years ago - it’s a bit unfair to say Apple caught you off guard here.
- eastWestMath 9y agoAs someone else pointed out, the deprecation of AFP was announced over 4 years ago, 8 years into this servers lifespan (it’s a 2006 model, right?). This was a problem their network administrator should have been aware of for 4 years, that’s probably enough time to figure out a solution!
- feikname 9y agoThose aren't hardware-focused companies, but I'd say Adobe and Autodesk do quite well on maintaining high quality products (and, like Apple does, being pricey)
- dreamcompiler 9y ago> Is a product obsolete as soon there is a newer product? If it's an Apple product, yes. Apple only makes money when they sell hardware. Several years ago they made a conscious business decision to quit supporting old hardware the way they once had because it didn't make money. Now the only purpose of Apple software is to push more hardware sales, which is why the MacOS and IOS upgrade cycles are so frequent, why there has been a continual decline in Apple software quality, and why you see things like the IOS battery scandal that slows down older devices.
- tarjei 9y agoWhat I find odd is that no analysts are asking Tim about the direction Apple is taking wrt. to build quality and developer support. To me, Apple seems to have chosen a direction that will push developers over to other platforms. This will not happen overnight, but I suspect that in 2-3 years time the guys who have to develop on Macs will be the ones groaning over their OS - not the Windows people. The combo of too expensive hardware and low build quality on OSX + bad DX is Apples biggest threat at the moment.
- madeofpalk 9y agoSuccess hides all problems. Didn't Apple just end their largest quarter to date? What would analysts be upset about? What would Apple think their problem is when they're making more money than ever. Perspective is important here. I agree generally with this whole "Macs going downhill" theme, but this isnt new, and the market doesnt really care. I meant the infamous "Apple has lost the functional high ground" article was from beginning of 2015, after months of this sentiment going around last time https://marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-ground https://marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-grou...
- zelos 9y agoI think the same thing. Abandoning servers as it's not their main product is fine, but what about all those developers who want to build a basic CI system? For Android it's simple - a bunch of cheap Dell servers with Linux or something. But iOS? Most teams are using Mac Minis as servers, but they haven't been updated in years and are dual-core only, so they're not great options.
- zbentley 9y agoPast a certain number of OSX instances needed for testing, a lot of shops virtualize. The licensing can be a hassle, though. I suspect a lot of places that do this wouldn't pass an audit.
- zbentley 9y agoIt will push OSX developers to other platforms. OSX likely serves the purpose (for Apple) of a Mac hardware value-add plus a revenue funnel into iPhones/iOS. At worst, OSX/Macs are basically a glorified iOS device dock. Even if the worst isn't true, though, there's very little incentive for Apple to spend resources on enticing developers onto OSX; they don't make much money/prestige off of it, and I'd be willing to bet that OSX app-store-distributed payware apps' revenue to Apple is a tiny, tiny fraction of what iOS apps get them. TL;DR they need to attract developers onto iOS, not OSX, and developers are already plenty attracted to iOS because money.
- petecooper 9y agoAnecdotally, I've been migrating macOS client networks away from macOS Server for a few years. The preferred solution is an HPE MicroServer with Linux (typically Ubuntu LTS) with `netatalk` and various trimmings (`avahi` etc). Bonus points are garnered for a Time Machine option, too. The icing on the cake is the clients can also choose their "Mac" server icon for Finder: http://simonwheatley.co.uk/2008/04/avahi-finder-icons/ http://simonwheatley.co.uk/2008/04/avahi-finder-icons/
- idorube 9y agoThis is also supported on FreeNAS and works like a charm.
- kalleboo 9y agoI have a NAS with both SMB and AFP (netatalk-based) support, and despite Apple deprecating AFP, it's is still faster and more stable than Apple's SMB support. I guess the Apple devs who made that stuff in the 90's knew what they were doing...
- pixl97 9y ago> it's is still faster and more stable than Apple's SMB support. Anything is faster and more stable than Apple's SMB support. MacOS is horribly slow and buggy with almost every modern NAS. Fixes include enabling SMB 1.0 (WTF?).
- zbentley 9y agoCross post from elsewhere on this thread: Apple's SMB support does indeed suck, but if you need to use macs as SMB clients, tuning the SMB client config ("man nsmb.conf") can dramatically improve performance! It's night and day for me when I force a newer protocol, increase the cache size, turn off signing/verification (if acceptable given my network conditions), and increase the async read/write counts.
- vetinari 9y agoUnfortunately, Gen8 microserver requires proprietary driver for it's RAID controller (for SATA-2!) and fan control; and Gen10 doesn't support hotplug for drives.
- duncan_bayne 9y agoI run a nearly identical server at home (the Mac Pro that is, not the massive RAID). I made the decision to install FreeBSD when I set it up and haven't regretted that for a minute. The hardware is actually lovely, right down to the literal nuts and bolts. Just stay away from the Apple software ecosystem and you'll be fine.
- nailer 9y agoThis will hit everyone using non-iOS Apple products either sooner or later: You're no longer Apple's priority. You haven't been for some time. MacOS isn't getting major updates, the development team has been largely disbanded: MacOS is a niche platform that only exists to develop iOS apps. One day it won't even do that. Apple already markets and wants iOS to replace your laptops, and doesn't significantly care about the server or workstation markets. If you rely on MacOS you need to think about this, and the longer you delay it the more it's going to hurt.
- rimliu 9y ago> MacOS isn't getting major updates There is new version each year. And if you are talking about features, what feature would you consider "major update"? New filesystem maybe? > the development team has been largely disbanded Source? > only exists to develop iOS apps Source? > Apple markets and wants iOS to replace your laptops Source? But I agree that they probably do not care about server markets.
- alex_hitchins 9y agoI don't have the time to locate all those source reference requests, but I know I've seen stories related to each point here on HN recently. Seems fairly common knowledge that Apple have disbanded macOS team and is focusing on iOS based future. Am I mistaken?
- minikites 9y ago>New filesystem maybe? You mean the one that shipped on iOS first and benefits iOS the most? To me, that shows how far the Mac has fallen in Apple's priority list.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago> There is new version each year. And if you are talking about features, what feature would you consider "major update"? New filesystem maybe? As a Mac user, it seems like the last 4+ years of MacOS updates have added nothing but greater iOS integration, bugs, and misfeatures.
- 9y ago
- thinkMOAR 9y agoOnly thing that catches my eye is, only 16GB ram for 300TB storage?
- solatic 9y agoRelatively low number of clients with relatively sporadic access to archives which are rarely accessed? Doesn't surprise me.
- saurik 9y agoI don't find that surprising at all: these are very large files, and they aren't probably not scrubbing around in them back and forth but streaming them off the disk in a single pass; so you could have 128GB of RAM and you are unlikely to get much caching on the files themselves... the only thing that matters is the directory index structures, and I wouldn't be shocked if they needed more than 16GB for that (because these are large files).
- smoyer 9y agoI was with C-COR/ARRIS when we bought N-Cube for their VOD streaming technology (cable television). You'd be very surprised at the difference between the amount of content stored and the 5 minute buffered content currently being streamed. I'm not surprised at the amount of memory OR that the server isn't sweating under the workload. I guess now that clients can't attach, it's technically in the warm-down phase of its workout.
- vetinari 9y agoI noticed 100MB/s. You don't need 10GbE and Cat6 for that. 1GbE and Cat5/5+ are fine. The SOHO NAS from Synology or QNAP with ARM CPUs, 1-2 GB RAM and 1x 1GbE ports are achieving such performance.
- wolrah 9y agoThat's what caught my eye too. 100MB/s is nothing. The author claims that he's getting half that with SMB, which means something is horrifically broken with his system. Anything worth using as a file server should have no trouble doing 100MB/sec with pretty much any protocol.
- toyg 9y agoI'm so happy I'm still on Sierra. They were so busy on the new filesystem, that they broke so much other stuff. But hey, at least if you don't like an OSX version, now you can just wait a year and you'll get a new one! Which may or may not have more bugs.
- rdl 9y agoFWIW, you can't share APFS formatted volumes via AFP at all. AFP is probably not something you should depend on going forward.
- hollander 9y agoHow long does it take to reformat 300TB of disk? I guess the most time it takes is the restore from backup, because that seems to be the safest and easiest way to do this. But I might be wrong here. I can see the problem here, and it's annoying that Apple doesn't handle this better, and doesn't give you any insights whether they will solve this or not. But I'm pretty sure that reformatting solves this problem for him a lot faster than waiting for a bugfix.
- cakerino 9y agoTo move 300TB (say, restoring a backup) at an optimistic 300MB/s would take just under two weeks.
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- avianlyric 9y agoCan you not use OSX to perform the conversion for you in place?[1] There should also be a `diskutil` command that does it as well. Then you get snapshots and better volume management. As always do your research first, this conversion is a one-way thing. [1] https://datarecovery.wondershare.com/apfs/how-to-convert-hfs-to-apfs-without-losing-data.html https://datarecovery.wondershare.com/apfs/how-to-convert-hfs...
- therealmarv 9y agoMy information is that reformatting HFS+ to APFS is only a matter of seconds or minutes because what is mostly replaced is metadata (not the real data). So going from Sierra to High Sierra should be no problem with reformatting, but going back is a big problem then ;)
- Hendrikto 9y agoEasy solution: Don‘t use Macs as servers, they are completely the wrong tool for the job. > Nowadays, I purchase iMac18,2’s to realize it has no thunderbolt2 Another tip: Read up on the hardware you are buying. I can‘t believe this guy... buys hardware seemingly without even looking at the specs and then complains.
- littlecranky67 9y agoYou are absolutely right. Apple quit the Server buisness when they killed the Xserve, and relying on Macs as servers is really a bad idea given their support interval for macOS. Seems the author is very angry that his next server cannot be a fancy Apple device.
- idorube 9y agoI'm easing into it :-)
- alex_hitchins 9y agoI'd suggest looking at a replacement solution around an open filesystem. Then, even if the world moves on to other technologies, you still have the source you can update or even hire someone to maintain.
- 7Z7 9y ago>fancy You don't need this part. Per the article, it is a brand the author knows and has used reliably in the past, and has some knowledge of - you don't need to belittle his choices as fanboyism.
- smoyer 9y agoApple sold these Macs as servers ... I even had one that was a 1U rack-mount unit. Businesses (unless you're a hosting service) generally depreciate server hardware on at least a 5-year schedule so it's no surprise to me that these are still in the field. It would be very interesting to know exactly how many are still out there running!
- 9y ago
- smoyer 9y agoClearly your server is obsolete ... and this describes why my last ever Apple purchase was in 2012. I bought an iPad 1 ... it's still a wonderful piece of hardware and I (try to) use it for web browsing nearly every day. Unfortunately, Apple realized that it was under-powered just after the iOS 5 release and it hasn't gotten updates since early 2014. It works fine except that it also doesn't have a browser that will run current protocols and standards. Sigh!
- qplex 9y agoPlanned obsolescence is cancer. It's not just Apple that does it though.
- akvadrako 9y agoPlanned obsolescence is literally the opposite of cancer.
- qplex 9y agoIt's an expression of speech for distaste of the malignant practice of making something redundant even if there was no need to do that; Much like even if a human soul would rather not perish but yet there was a class of malignant diseases that will make it.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago> Clearly your server is obsolete The server works as well as it ever did. The problem is entirely in the software used on the client machines. That's not what "obsolete" means.
- smoyer 9y agoSorry ... I should know by now that sarcasm doesn't work well on the Internet. But the truth is that the server is de-facto obsolete if there are no clients that can talk to it. Hopefully my second paragraph is clear that I don't appreciate planned obsolescence.
- Karupan 9y agoApple has been removing features from OS X for a while now, and I’m sure it’s going to continue with their focus on iOS. Eventually we will all be running iOS on macs. P.S: I’ve always stayed one version behind as I can get stuff done rather than spend time and energy fixing whatever Apple broke in the new version.
- solatic 9y agoDear author, Do you have an unexpired warranty? A support contract guaranteeing that certain features will continue to work for the length of the contract? If so, please have your lawyers get in contact with our legal team. Signed, Fake Tim Cook P.S. Next time, either make sure your asses are covered, or use FOSS instead, so that in the event that public maintenance is no longer provided, you still have the option of forking the codebase and hiring an engineer to do whatever maintenance you need, as opposed to using our closed, proprietary product, where you are now SOL.
- petecooper 9y agoAdd to this the macOS Server components will be significantly deprecated soon: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208312 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208312
- mschuster91 9y agoOh God. Just... wtf. Apple really is trying to get out of anything that's not iOS?! macOS Server is the equivalent of MS's Small Business Server package, and now they're, essentially, removing core features out of it.
- petecooper 9y agoMy first thought was along the lines of "what's left in macOS Server to make it a server?".
- Corrado 9y agoI think the Update Cache and the MDM will still be there. Other than that I can't think of anything (major) that's not on that list. :( Of course, both of those things are pretty big components of iOS management. Which reinforces the idea that Apple doesn't really care about anything except iPhones.
- kalleboo 9y ago> Apple really is trying to get out of anything that's not iOS?! Yes, this has been obvious for years now
- Redoubts 9y agoMacOS had a Wiki service?!?
- jjgreen 9y agoWhat's a computer?
- danpalmer 9y agoGoing to throw my unpopular opinion out there... High Sierra has been nothing but a smooth update for me. APFS has corrected several external disk issues I've had. All in all, it has been a solid, if small, update, similar to the other releases like Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion.
- idorube 9y agoI'm quite interested in migrating to APFS, I just can't find any hardware that can connect to Serial Attached Storage.
- nawtacawp 9y agoI'm assuming you didn't read the article since it is about the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) and not APFS.
- code_sloth 9y agoIt's not that your opinion is unpopular, but that it's completely irrelevant.
- mschuster91 9y agoA HW question: how are all these cards attached to the system? IIRC the cheesegrater Mac Pros only have 4 PCI slots.
- idorube 9y agoSAS can be daisy chained.
- mschuster91 9y agoArticle says "bunch of 10G ethernet cards" and "some SAS cards", though.
- hnarn 9y agoFirstly, Apple has never been a respected actor in the server market. If you're investing heavily into Apple servers, you're investing in a niche. Presume accordingly. Secondly, converting/reformatting 300 Tb of disk is a lot of work, but it's probably less work than contacting Apple, and whining about how Apple is going down the drain in a public blog post. I've never been a big Apple fan in terms of the company, but the iPhone is an excellent product. The iPod was an excellent product. I have never heard anyone say that in terms of server infrastructure, Apple makes "excellent products". The only lesson here is: don't drink the kool aid, and investigate every use case thoroughly without making emotional assumptions. edit: Despite knowing almost nothing about AFP, I found articles on Google saying that Apple shifted from AFP file sharing to SMB2 in an article dated 2013 -- that's five years ago! Apple themselves state that AFP is deprecated. If you elect to run your own servers and support your own services completely, these are news you should be reading.
- dagw 9y agoI have never heard anyone say that in terms of server infrastructure, Apple makes "excellent products". Once upon a time they did. The Xserver and Xserver RAID where really amazing products when they where first released. However they couldn't really gain traction and quickly gave up on that market.
- extra88 9y agoCertainly the hardware was great and the Xserve RAID was a surprisingly good value for its price.
- fredgrott 9y agogiven that BSD is having trouble of keeping enough contributors to keep up with security issues its not an idle claim that Apple is going down the drain...its in fact reality but its like boiling a frog in boiling water its tarting out slow
- tzahola 9y ago“Apple shifted from AFP file sharing to SMB2” * SMB2 with undocumented Apple-specific extensions (https://www.mankier.com/8/vfs_fruit https://www.mankier.com/8/vfs_fruit)
- mahgnous 9y agoApple switched to SMB, AFP is done.
- michelb 9y agoSorry to hear this. But it sounds like careless system management. I work at a lot of video shops and none of them are even on Sierra, let alone High Sierra. Update one laptop and test. Apple has put AFP on the backseat for several years now (since they switched the default in Mavericks), in favour of SMB2.
- idorube 9y agoI admit, I usually let my users upgrade their clients as soon as they wish. This is the first time it broke something. :-(
- sbuk 9y agoApple scheduled AFP for deprecation with OS X 10.9 in 2013 - 4.5 years ago. There has been plenty of time between then and now to prepare for this.
- jo909 9y ago"And I have one particular server that we have loved for a long time." Yes, for over 10 years now! (I looked up the manufacturing date from the serial number, week 29 of 2007) I feel for your acute pain, but I think you got your moneys worth and then some out of that system, there should be plenty of saved budget to replace that with a new storage server. One that has support from the vendor.
- nkkollaw 9y agoMeh, if your servers are valued that much, you should know better. I even know that Apple is not investing in servers anymore and hasn't in years. AFP was also abandoned. They should've planned for this and switched to some more solid server configuration like Linux.
- therealmarv 9y agoMy advice: Build your own workaround / software solution for this problem with a future opt out option to replace the server with Linux and Samba (yes I know Samba is a pain but it is the standard nowadays).
- PeterStuer 9y agoFirst of all, let me tell you that I feel your pain. Having something that behind the curtains 'just worked' in your toolbox stop working and being forced to spend time on it while you could be doing productive work just sucks. We all do it. We tend to focus on the troublemakers, dousing their frequent little fires, and just forget the 'good' guys that are chugging along day after day without a hitch. Is this the hardware equivalent of 'technical debt'? That lovely machine of yours is 10 years old. In our industry that does most definitely make it qualify as an antique (unfortunately not with the 'antique' valuations, going by the ~400$ these go for on eBay). Over those ten years, you've gotten good mileage out of it, but it looks like those maintenance free years are now taking their toll. Time to bite the bullet and find a new solution. even if they would revert on AFP, it would just be a temporary stay of execution. And I wouldn't look at Apple for this tbh. Servers and workstations have long Ceased to be 'mainstream' products for them.
- jamesfmilne 9y agoidorube You can take the SAS cards out of your Mac Pro and put them into a Thunderbolt expansion chassis, and keep using the same disk array. No need to reformat or convert to APFS. And you can export your disk array via SMB2 or NFS to the other Macs. It's a pity Apple don't make a decent Mac Mini anymore which could serve as a decent server. Maybe they'll release a new one some day.
- wazoox 9y agoApple doesn't take the professionals seriously. Yes, they supposedly shifted from AFP to SMB in 2013 but ever since, SMB performance of Mac OS hovered between laughable and abysmal. And it's not so much the SMB server, but the SMB client implementation that sucks. On gigabit ethernet, AFP as well as NFS on Mac reach easily 100 MB/s, while SMB hardly passes 50 MB/s. On 10GigE it's even worse: AFP, 1GB/s, SMB 150 MB/s. Testing on a Hackintosh, the same hardware that hardly passes 150 MB/s in SMB reaches 900 MB/s running Windows 10. SMB on MacOS is a bad joke for everyone needing to move big amounts of data. NFS works OK, but alas, the Finder has (many) bugs and some things don't work well (refreshing, icons, etc). AFP is still by far the best solution.
- zbentley 9y agoI've found that tuning some of the SMB options ("man nsmb.conf") has dramatically increased my recent Macs' SMB network throughput and the responsiveness of finder in huge/deep shared directory hierarchies (due to caching). I don't know if any of those apply to using OSX as an SMB drive host, but they might. None of this should be taken as disagreement with your post; just ideas for improvements if you find yourself thus frustrated again.
- zbentley 9y agoQuite tangental to the article, but: This is why you shouldn't name protocols/standards after products! I've worked with a few know-nothing users trying to slog through mac file sharing for the first time and got confused when I told them that the better/faster/better-supported sharing options, between macs, were the ones without "Apple" in the name. "But it's named after Apple; it's going to be the most official/best integrated thing if I'm on a Mac!" is a common barely-technical-user refrain. The same thing applies to the "Apple Partition Map" bootsector option when formatting disks. Give things a descriptive, concise, memorable name that has nothing to do with a brand. If you deprecate them, you'll be glad you did. /pedantry
- idorube 9y agoHi All, I've read all your comments and agree that a migration towards newer hardware and OSS Server software is needed. I've taking some first steps away from OSX Server and have come to the following results regarding the issue's I had. See below a comparison between old OSX server and new Ubuntu test server with regards to High Sierra: AFP Finder search on OSX 10.6.8 Server from High Sierra Client (17D47): No result (most often) -or- Incomplete results (certain mounted shares are not searched) AFP Finder search on Ubuntu 16.04.3 Server from High Sierra Client: Fast result Opening file works SMB Finder search on OSX 10.6.8 Server from High Sierra Client: results show after 7 seconds Opening file fails "The alias "<filename>” can’t be opened because the original item can’t be found. SMB Finder search on Ubuntu 16.04.3 Server from High Sierra Client: Fast result, Opening file fails "The alias "<filename>” can’t be opened because the original item can’t be found. AFP Finder search on OSX 10.6.8 Server from Sierra Client: Fast result Opening file works AFP Finder search on Ubuntu 16.04.3 Server from Sierra Client: Fast result Opening file works SMB Finder search on OSX 10.6.8 Server from Sierra Client: Fast result Opening file works SMB Finder search on Ubuntu 16.04.3 Server from Sierra Client: Fast result Opening file works Some speed indications: SMB file copy from Ubuntu 16.04.3 Server to Sierra Client: 20.91MB/s 21923002.62 bytes/sec AFP file copy from Ubuntu 16.04.3 Server to Sierra Client: 49.19MB/s 49459712.12 bytes/sec SMB file copy from OSX 10.6.8 Server to Sierra Client: 48.98MB/s 51399308.67 bytes/sec AFP file copy from OSX 10.6.8 Server to Sierra Client: 64.58MB/s 67710528.40 bytes/sec