• Storage & Archiving

  OS X Mavericks Demotes AFP in Favor of SMB2

  Posted by Andrew Richards on June 17, 2013 at 1:13 pm

  The admins over at Xsanity seem pretty pleased with this, and I figured it would be notable news here too.

  From Apple’s OS X Mavericks Core Technology Overview PDF (page 21):

  Network File Systems

  OS X includes a broad set of network file services—SMB, AFP, and NFS—for sharing files between Mac and PC.

  SMB2
  SMB2 is the new default protocol for sharing files in OS X Mavericks. SMB2 is superfast, increases security, and improves Windows compatibility.

  • Efficient. SMB2 features Resource compounding, allowing multiple requests to be sent in a single request. In addition, SMB2 can use large reads and writes to make better use of faster networks as well as large MTU support for blazing speeds on 10 Gigabit Ethernet. It aggressively caches file and folder properties and uses opportu- nistic locking to enable better caching of data. It’s even more reliable, thanks to the ability to transparently reconnect to servers in the event of a temporary disconnect.
  • Secure. SMB2 supports Extended Authentication Security using Kerberos and NTLMv2.
  • Compatible. SMB2 is automatically used to share files between two Mac computers running OS X Mavericks, or when a Windows client running Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8 connects to your Mac. OS X Mavericks maintains support for AFP and SMB network file-sharing protocols, automatically selecting the appropriate protocol as needed.

  AFP
  The Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) is the traditional network file service used on the Mac. Built-in AFP support provides connectivity with older Mac computers and Time Machine–based backup systems.

  NFS
  NFS v3 and v4 support in OS X allows for accessing UNIX and Linux desktop and server systems. With AutoFS, you can now specify automount paths for your entire organization using the same standard automounter maps supported by Linux and Solaris. For enhanced security, NFS can use Kerberos authentication as an alternative to UNIX UID-based authentication.

  Best,
  Andy

  Steve Modica replied 13 years, 1 month ago 4 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Eric Hansen

  June 17, 2013 at 1:31 pm

  Interesting. I’d love to hear steve Modica’s thoughts on 10GbE performance.

  Is SMB2 available for all versions of windows?

  E

  Eric Hansen
  Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
  https://www.erichansen.tv
• 

  Andrew Richards

  June 17, 2013 at 1:47 pm

  [Eric Hansen] “Is SMB2 available for all versions of windows? “

  The specific version Mavericks is adopting (SMB 2.1) was introduced in Win7/2008r2.

  Best,
  Andy
• 

  Bob Zelin

  June 17, 2013 at 10:16 pm

  this is very exciting news. It’s a shame that Adobe has after all these years resolved the 2.15 Gig file limit issue with AFP in CS6 latest release. And now after all of research, Apple is switching to SMB2.

  Of course, if you have legacy equipment that is hooked up via AFP (which all of us do) – then having the AFP capability is still very important, and the Adobe fix is also very important. that is – until we all switch over to SMB2 in the entire network, which could in real life take a couple of years.

  I think overall, the new Mac Pro will be a very positive product.

  Bob Zelin

  Bob Zelin
  Rescue 1, Inc.
  maxavid@cfl.rr.com
• 

  Steve Modica

  June 18, 2013 at 6:24 pm

  My experience with AFP is that it was easier to get larger IO sizes out of it to make the server storage happier. Samba always generated smaller IOs.

  That being said, Samba did a much better job scaling. One users activity impacted other users a lot less. In fact, I have a bug going on right now where Premiere is stat’ing a ton of files and causing AFP to hit very high CPU numbers. This takes out other users. Samba sails right through it. The individual user sees the same issue, but the other users don’t get impacted. Samba scales better and we can get much larger aggregate stream counts with Samba.

  One other advantage of Samba is it’s VFS layer. Samba gives vendors that ability to insert modules within the data path. If you look at a unix system with samba installed and dig around, you’ll find a vfs directory (that comes with samba). In there, you’ll see all these vfs modules:

  titaniumz:/usr/local/lib/samba/vfs# ls
  acl_tdb.so commit.so full_audit.so scannedonly.so time_audit.so
  acl_xattr.so crossrename.so linux_xfs_sgid.so shadow_copy.so weird.so
  aio_fork.so default_quota.so netatalk.so shadow_copy2.so xattr_tdb.so
  audit.so dirsort.so preopen.so smb_traffic_analyzer.so zfsacl.so
  cacheprime.so expand_msdfs.so readahead.so streams_depot.so
  cap.so extd_audit.so readonly.so streams_xattr.so
  catia.so fake_perms.so recycle.so syncops.so

  These all do different things. They are all open source. Many of them are written by specific vendors to highlight their platform (IBM, SGI, Isilon).

  Some of them deal with mundane permissions or file naming issues. Some of them attempt to deal with big IO performance issues (cacheprime and readahead for example).

  What’s wonderful about this is that vendors can insert code here to improve their own performance.

  The one thing we’ll lose that a lot of apple customers liked was “ignore ownership on this volume”. I don’t think Samba has anything like that other than user squashing. Perhaps we’ll have to do that.

  Steve

  Steve Modica
  CTO, Small Tree Communications

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