Joseph Hinkle at MyITForum.com

An excerpt from an email I had to write tonight, explaining why some folks in my group spent way too much time trying to do something that could have been solved for $1500.

Macintosh computers can access Windows file shares in a variety of ways. For many years, Macs communicated to all network shares using AFP, or Apple Filing Protocol. As such, Microsoft developed what is now known as Windows Services for Macintosh. Windows Services for Macintosh adds AFP support to Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2003 Server. This implementation, based on AFP 2.2, has several limitations, including a 31 character file names, 65,536 files per volume, as well as a 2TB volume size. Windows Services for Macintosh also requires an index to be built when a server is restarted and at other times through the life of the volume. Our Mac-specific volumes are shared using Windows Services for Macintosh.


The location was experiencing an issue where the index was not properly being rebuilt, due to the size and number of files in the share. This was preventing the plant from mounting the volume properly on the Macs using AFP. When mounted using SMB, the Windows file sharing protocol, additional detail was lost. This detail is stored as a resource fork that is automatically "joined" with the original file using AFP.

There is a lot more than that, but that generally details the problem. Group Logic has a product named ExtremeZ-IP that fixes many of the limitations of the Microsoft implementation of the older version of AFP. It does it by implementing the latest version (of course). It will also support Windows Server 2008 shortly.