Re: MetaSan on OSX Server 10.6.8 - Setting up Share points Permissions through OSX Server

Yussuf,

I will describe for you what I recommend to Mr. Jean in detail off this thread. We have AFP working smoothly on our metaSAN master but it's a very stripped down configuration. If you have a second server I would recommend using that as a domain server. From my experience this is the best way to get AFP/SMB working with your metaSAN volumes.

After doing a clean install of OSX Server Snow Leopard do the following...

Start with 2 users in System Prefs... 1 Admin user and 1 normal user, named differently. The normal users is how your work group will login to metaSAN.

Install metaSAN and add the volumes you wish to share to both fibre and copper to it's definitions. Follow all normal steps to do so.

Go to the Server Preferences app and to the Sharing module. Check the boxes to the left of the volumes you want to share but leave the big Turn Sharing On button left to off. You are assigning the volumes in this step, nothing more.

Go to the Server Admin app next. Enable AFP (and SMB if you need that). You should now see in the share points under AFP the volumes listed that you assigned in Server Preferences. You are just using Server Admin to enable AFP for the users you set up in the System Preferences/Users area.

Now, all your users should be able to log into the shared SAN protected volumes via AFP as the normal user you setup in System Prefs. If you check Server Admin's AFP/Connections you will find multiple instances of the same user name.

Sounds backwards and overly simple, but it seems to be the only way we found to dance around the volume/directory locking issue with share points over copper and fibre.

If you need separate user groups and isolated share points for other servers, I would recommend using a different server all together for creating these non metaSAN share points and user groups. Regardless of a workstations (clients) user, they can log into the metaSAN master with the commonly shared user/password and still work on another server as a different workgroup/user identity with custom permissions.

That should do it. If your running on an XServer, I'd recommend only using the built in NICs for metadata and simple internet requests from the server and have a bonded card for all I/O data flow to AFP and SMB users and make sure all users are using a specified IP address to connect to that bonded line.

Hope this helps although this configuration may come as a surprise. I haven't heard from Oliver about his experiences yet but it is the configuration we use to serve over 15 AFP users and 6 fibre clients to our two metaSAN volumes with out any AFP share issues.

Cheers,

bk