The SerNet GmbH is joined by Ralph Böhme from NetAFP to further strengthen the Samba team. Böhme is the main developer of Netatalk, a free AFP implementation for Linux servers. The step comes as a response to current changes in the protocol landscape: The release of MacOS X 10.9 (“Maverick”) made SMB the preferred network protocol for exchanging data. Apple placed its own protocol AFP in the second row.
Netatalk plays a role similar to Samba in terms of the SMB protocol used by Microsoft. Samba specialist SerNet reinforces the team of Samba developers as well as the on-site AFP expertise by hiring Böhme. Furthermore he implements his project NetAFP into the development of SerNet. In consequence a scalable migration support for the conversion from AFP to SMB will be available for Netatalk users worldwide.
“Many users and manufacturers use Netatalk as Linux servers for Apple clients. Over the next two years, they need to migrate to SMB,” says Ralph Böhme. “The merger with the global Samba support at SerNet means to keep the open source expertise from Netatalk alive and infuse it in the best free SMB Stack out there.”
The coming weeks will see a variety of properties from Netatalk being ported to Samba in order to yet improve the support of Apple clients. These features include the consistent access to data with Netatalk via Samba and run-time interoperability through integrated file-locking. The Apple -compatible support for commonly used special characters in file names will be available soon. In addition, the Spotlight indexing and search with Samba for Apple clients will be possible in the future .
About SerNet:
The SerNet GmbH is the global technological market leader in services around the open source software Samba. SerNet is the only systems integrator worldwide who has members of the Samba core team under contract. For more information about SerNet please visit http://www.sernet.de.
About Samba :
Samba is the most important free software alternative for SMB servers, especially in the Windows environment. See http://www.samba.org. SerNet is the main provider of Samba support and maintains a wide range of ready compiled Samba packages for different platforms. See also http://EnterpriseSamba.com.