This post is about a very subtle difference I learned between “File Sharing” and AFP when using Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server (and probably previous versions as well.) But first bear with me while I explain how I got here.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been taking a crash course in Mac OS X Server administration. I bought a Mac Mini Server and ever since I’ve been reading as much of the server documentation as I could and installing and reinstalling and staying up way to late every day.
I reinstall now about once every two days, and each time, I try to maintain as much of the previous installation’s settings as possible. For instance, last time I exported and reimported DNS and Open Directory (via Workgroup Manager) information successfully.
I keep network home directories, time machine backups, and mysql data on the second drive in the Mac Mini Server so that I can do clean installs without destroying that data.
As I’m geting more used to using the tools such as Server Admin and Workgroup Manager, I’m using Server Preferences less and less. This happened organically. Server Preferences has a simpler friendlier interface, but I’m finding that it may be a “false friend” as it sometimes does more than you’d like when you want to have finer control over your server.
After my most recent clean install, I enabled the AFP service in Server Admin and I was removing the default shares and adding my preferred shares on the other drive. I also went ahead and shared the network Time Machine disk. But when I started the AFP service, none of my computers that had previously been using Time Machine on the network acknowledged that the drive was there.
I went into my iMac and I re-selected the drive. It started a fresh backup but in the root directory of the drive instead of in Shared > Backups where it was previously backing up. I immediately stopped that backup and went to investigate.
For all previous installations I had enabled network Time Machine in Server Preferences, not Server Admin. So I went to Server Preferences and then to Time Machine and it told me something strange. It said that “File Sharing” was not turned on. But it clearly was. My network home directory was working fine and I had already started and stopped a backup using network Time Machine.
Well that’s it, clearly File Sharing is a different concept from AFP. First of all, File Sharing will share things by default using SMB and AFP, which at least at this point, I don’t care that much about. I can always enable SMB when I need it.
Also, when you start network Time Machine using Server Preferences it creates the directory structure Shared > Backups on the drive you select. Then it only shares the Backups folder. So when you go in Server Admin to do the same thing, you only want to share the Backups folder and not the whole drive. Once I did this my remaining computers woke up, recognized that the Time Machine drive was now present, and continued to back up as if I had never reinstalled OS X Server. This is just what I wanted.
Also, for the computer where I had changed the backup drive, I now selected the new share and it also recognized its old backup file and continued with its backups as if I had not reinstalled. This was a pleasant surprise.
So now my server is set so that “File Sharing” is off and AFP is on, and that’s fine with me. Hopefully I can forget that Server Preferences exists and it will be one less tool to have to worry about.
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