Questions[afp](server)

I have a home file server running FreeNAS 8. A few days ago I used rsync to upload my entire iTunes library from Mac so that I could load my library over the network instead of off a slow USB drive. This mostly worked, and iTunes runs much better now, but I'm running into issues accessing any songs that have non-ascii characters in it (I first noticed the problem when loading Queensrÿche tracks). The files would show up in the Finder, but any attempt to access them made them vanish until I reconnected to the server.

After some research I found out this is because OSX uses a different UTF character order from Linux. OSX filesystems use Unicode Normalization Form D (NFD), where linux uses Form C (NFC). Rsync doesn't convert these forms when it performs the copy from my mac to the server, now when iTunes tries to access a file with a special character over the network, the files on the server have the wrong encoding and afpd reports they don't exist.

What is the best way to address this problem? Is it possible to make rsync perform the unicode conversion while uploading the base library to the server? Can I configure afpd to transmit/receive filenames in NFD format? Is there an easy solution to change the filenames on the server? I found some stuff about a program named convmv, but I don't know if I can run that on FreeNAS.

Running Apple's Lion Server (10.7.3). I am trying to get VPN clients (clients on another subnet) to see the server's Apple File share. I know that Bonjour doesn't route over a VPN or subnet, so I am adding static DNS entries.

AFP shares work, as I can connect directly to the share using afp://servername.example.com. But, Finder and CLI tools are unable to discover the share.

From my research it sounds like I can use DNS to add SRV entries to make the services discoverable. I have added PTR and SRV entries:

_afpovertcp._tcp.example.co. 10800 IN PTR servername._afpovertcp._tcp.example.com. servername._afpovertcp._tcp.example.com. 10800 IN SRV 0 0 548 servername.example.com.

There is an A record for servername.example.com.

This helps Finder discover the AFP share, but connecting using this link fails.

Using dig I can confirm the PTR and SRV entries.

dig SRV servername._afpovertcp._tcp.example.com

This finds the record, and:

host -t PTR _afpovertcp._tcp.example.com

points back to the server name.

Using dns-sd I see the first signs of problems.

dns-sd -F # successfully finds the example.com group
dns-sd -B _afpovertcp._tcp # correctly shows servername as an afp share
dns-sd -L servername _afpovertcp._tcp example.com # fails to locate anything

The dns-sd commands and dig/host behave the same locally on the server as they do through the VPN. So, am I going down the wrong path trying to add SRV records to DNS? It's showing progress, but I'm just having a hard time getting the servername to point to a physical IP address.

Copying a file using AFP took 40 minutes but using scp it only took 7 mins. Why is AFP so slow?

My setup:

• D-Link DIR-300 wifi router
• iMac with Snow-Leopard serves AFP
• Macbook with Leopard is the client

Is it possible that a single machine running avahi advertises other machines sharing files over afp ?

I have different machines running Gentoo but I don't want to run avahi on each server.

I've got a huge server (running Ubuntu Linux) which has got a 2TB raid sitting there just begging for me to backup to it.

I run netatalk to enable sharing via the AFP protocol to my Macs (all my client boxes are Macs pretty much) and had setup timemachine to use a shared drive on the server as it's destination.

Only trouble is it seems to be completely unreliable. I reguarly get problems where TimeMachine cannot finish the backup for one reason or another, and sometimes it seems to bring the whole server down (I know its a software rather than a hardware issue because the server is actually Ubuntu running under KVM and the KVM host is always still running).

So the question is has anyone had any success trying to do this? Does anyone know of any issues? Is there a better way to go about this? I know its a little vague but I was wondering if other users had experiences to share.