Experiences with SFM ...

[mrdom]

We're investigating the possibility of adding a Windows 2000 server to our school's network to solve the great frustrations we've been experiencing in trying to find one computer to reliably serve both Macintosh and PC clients.

For those forum colleagues who are running SFM on their 2k servers, how happy have you been with the protocol's performance? Any big huge problems to be aware of? I would be particularly interested in those colleagues who are running SFM and have Macintosh clients running Office 2004 - Microsoft Word 2004 in particular.

We don't have any super-advanced needs - just a simple method of sharing files with our Macintosh labs. Client software on the Macs ranges from 10.3.9 to 10.4.10

Thanks for your input.

 

[itsp1965]

MRDom, I am no Mac expert by any means but isn't v10.x of the MacOS Unix based? Instead of SFM couldn't you use something like SFU (Services for Unix) or setup SAMBA on one of your Mac boxes.

 

[mrdom]

Thanks for the post, itsp. We originally tried to solve our problem with a Linux-based server. We were running Samba v3 (latest release), and had disastrous results with our Mac clients. We received countless file error messages and dropped network connections. I'm still not convinced that it had to do with the Mac client itself, but rather, the way that Microsoft Word 2004 interacts with files. Netatalk, the AFP server solution in Linux-based distributions, worked, but was spotty. We often needed a restart once per day, and speed between client and server was very bad.

I'm just checking in to see if SFM would provide something stable. I can live with a few bugs, but I'm looking for something that I don't have to restart or reboot once or twice per day.

Thanks again.