Easy solution: Donāt use Macs as servers, they are completely the wrong tool for the job.
> Nowadays, I purchase iMac18,2ās to realize it has no thunderbolt2
Another tip: Read up on the hardware you are buying. I canāt believe this guy... buys hardware seemingly without even looking at the specs and then complains.
Apple 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.
Dear 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.
First 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.
Apple 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.
Add to this the macOS Server components will be significantly deprecated soon:
Apple has been removing features from OS X for a while now, and Iām sure itās going to continue with their focus on iOS. Eventually we will all be running iOS on macs.
P.S: Iāve 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.
Anecdotally, 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:
I 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?
Clearly 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!
FWIW, you can't share APFS formatted volumes via AFP at all. AFP is probably not something you should depend on going forward.
What 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.
How 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.
"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.
Hi 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>ā canāt be opened because the original item canāt be found.
SMB Finder search on Ubuntu 16.04.3 Server from High Sierra Client: Fast result, Opening file fails "The alias "<filename>ā canāt be opened because the original item canāt 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
Sorry 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.
I 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.
I'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.
Quite 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
Going 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
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.
Meh, 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.
My 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).
A HW question: how are all these cards attached to the system? IIRC the cheesegrater Mac Pros only have 4 PCI slots.
What's a computer?
Only thing that catches my eye is, only 16GB ram for 300TB storage?
This 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.
Firstly, 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.