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.
He didn't know what the problem was, so he contacted Apple support. Unless you are suggesting he reformat 300tb everytime there's an issue, I don't see how he could have avoided contacting Apple in his situation.
> ... and whining about how Apple is going down the drain in a public blog post.
I don't see why the author can't voice his opinion on his personal blog. You've voicing your appreciation of specific Apple products in a public forum.
> Apple themselves state that AFP is deprecated. Deprecating isn't the same as removing. Unless Apple has previously said they are removing (or will remove) AFP support in High Sierra release notes, or otherwise announce it somewhere, I don't see how it's the user's fault at all.
2. Of course anyone can voice any opinion about Apple in any forum they want, but I'm not the one with a current ongoing issue that I know a solution to but am choosing not to implement to the benefit of shaming Apple in public instead.
3. You are correct that deprecating isn't removing, but when you're in a niche market (Apple servers), using any setup that includes deprecated protocols or components is a bad idea, and you should know this and plan for it if you elect to roll your own.
The person who wrote this post seems to have a very entitled sense of what he as a customer deserves in terms of continued software support from Apple, and very little sense of what in turn his customers and/or colleagues are entitled to and should expect from him/those that are responsible for keeping their business critical solution working.
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.
I too found third-party articles, but the only official notice I could find from Apple was in the recent APFS FAQs [1]. Either I'm searching for the wrong terms, or Apple could have communicated the issue better.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Fi...
"SMB2 is the new default protocol for sharing files in OS X Mavericks. SMB2 is superfast, increases security, and improves Windows compatibility. ... SMB2 is automatically used to share files between two Mac computers running OS X Mavericks, or when a Windows client running Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8 connects to your Mac. OS X Mavericks maintains support for AFP and SMB network file-sharing protocols, automatically selecting the appropriate protocol as needed. ...
The Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) is the traditional network file service used on the Mac. Built-in AFP support provides connectivity with older Mac computers and Time Machine–based backup systems."
https://images.apple.com/media/us/osx/2013/docs/OSX_Maverick...
* SMB2 with undocumented Apple-specific extensions (https://www.mankier.com/8/vfs_fruit)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, this has been obvious for years now
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.
The icing on the cake is the clients can also choose their "Mac" server icon for Finder:
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?).
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
Unlike Microsoft, Apple tends to focus on one or two ways to solve a problem. Generally speaking, if you’re having trouble doing something on a Mac (as a user) and it seems very difficult, you’re off the path and would be better to start over and rethink what you are doing.
When you’re doing something like relying on a deprecated protocol that Apple barely gave a shit about, you’re on thin ice. At best there are a couple of engineers and a strategic customer who care about the feature and it will sort of keep working. If not, you are out of luck.
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.
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-grou...
TL;DR they need to attract developers onto iOS, not OSX, and developers are already plenty attracted to iOS because money.
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.
As always do your research first, this conversion is a one-way thing.
[1] https://datarecovery.wondershare.com/apfs/how-to-convert-hfs...
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anything worth using as a file server should have no trouble doing 100MB/sec with pretty much any protocol.
I guess now that clients can't attach, it's technically in the warm-down phase of its workout.
Doesn't surprise me.
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.
> MacOS isn't getting major updates
> the development team has been largely disbanded
> only exists to develop iOS apps
> Apple markets and wants iOS to replace your laptops
But I agree that they probably do not care about server markets.
>> the development team has been largely disbanded
> Source?
TL;DR :
> In another sign that the company has prioritized the iPhone, Apple re-organized its software engineering department so there's no longer a dedicated Mac operating system team. There is now just one team, and most of the engineers are iOS first, giving the people working on the iPhone and iPad more power.
> Source?
Bloomberg.
Apple re-organized its software engineering department so there's no longer a dedicated Mac operating system team. There is now just one team, and most of the engineers are iOS first, giving the people working on the iPhone and iPad more power.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/how-apple...
> > Apple markets and wants iOS to replace your laptops
> Source?
apple.com, major print media, and all Mac Stores, which have ads talking about why iPad Pro are laptop replacements. Here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQB2NjhJHvY
It sounds like you have very little involvement with Apple products.
Seems fairly common knowledge that Apple have disbanded macOS team and is focusing on iOS based future. Am I mistaken?
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.
As a Mac user, it seems like the last 4+ years of MacOS updates have added nothing but greater iOS integration, bugs, and misfeatures.
Putting everything in an integrated system with limited to no expansion possibilities rules out a lot of potential users (anyone with common sense) and means that if one component fails or becomes obsolete the whole thing is useless. If there were awards for excellence in planned obsolescence those systems would be a shoe in.
My MacBook Pro 2016 keyboard finally failed beyond “usable” level and Apple has been keeping it in the shop, refusing a warranty repair. Another MBP we have started having issues with the keyboard.
I believe they are going downhill fast on the Mac front, both hardware and software.
Did you even read the comment you're responding to?
- removing features and essentially deprecating OS X Server: http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-death-of-macos-server/
- letting the Mac Pro languish for _four years_ without a single update or mention until recently
- the Touch Bar, which clearly shows they put some work into the technical aspects, given how it integrates with included Apple programs and thorough developer support. But they seemingly never talked to any actual users or developers in usability testing, given how well it's caught on.
- ignoring the keyboard quality issues in their "Pro" laptop line
- replacing included programs with crappy, feature-poor replacements (e.g. iPhoto to Photos, Disk Utility, etc)
The evidence seems to indicate that Apple doesn't care about the Mac and hasn't since 2011 or so. If they've started caring again, good, but it's going to take quite a few sustained Mac releases over the next couple of years for me to take them seriously again.