This chapter lists all the preferences that are pertinent to EtherShare. Find a description of how to set, view, change or delete preferences, with the HELIOS utility programs “prefdump”, “prefvalue”, and “prefrestore”, in the HELIOS Base manual.
Make sure that preference keys DO NOT start or end with a slash (“/”) character, and note that they are case-sensitive! Also, if any preference key or preference value includes spaces, that key or value must be enclosed in quotes.
Key: Programs/afpsrv/<preference>
This preference allows disabling the AFP 3.3 features for
OS X clients. Setting it to FALSE causes the server to
connect OS X clients via the AFP 2.2 protocol version.
This preference allows using dhx128 encrypted passwords on login.
This preference allows using DHX2 encrypted passwords on login.
The login security number of bits, the minimum value is 512, more than 128 is secure.
This preference allows using clear text passwords on login.
For Mac OS 7/8 compatibility reasons, the default is TRUE
which means that these Mac clients will be able to log on to the server.
If set to FALSE, the Change Password...
option in the Mac Connect To Server... dialog will not be
available. If the authentication server uses authentication
against a system that does not support changing passwords, PDC or LDAP,
this preference will automatically change to FALSE.
This preference determines how many directories are cached by “afpsrv” at a maximum. In volumes containing many directories, each containing few files, it can be advisable to increase this value. If the machine is fitted with little memory, and the volume contains fewer directories, each with a high number of files, a smaller value reduces the memory requirement of “afpsrv”.
If set to TRUE, the “Guest” option in the Mac Connect To Server...
dialog becomes available. Otherwise it will appear grayed out and cannot be selected.
Allows specifying a fully qualified DNS name for the server, e.g.
<hostname.yourdomain.com>.
By default, new files and folders which were created via
AFP will keep the ownership of the user who created it. As
AFP 2.2 for Mac OS 8/9 clients does not support individual
file permissions, changing this preference to TRUE
brings back the EtherShare 2.6/3.1 behavior which inherits the file
owner from its parent directory. TRUE/FALSE
will only affect AFP 2.2 and AFP 3.1 and newer volumes with disabled
useunixperm preference (see “Preferences” in the
HELIOS Base manual).
Specifies the number of “file and region locks” that the server allows simultaneously (if PCShare is installed on the same server it must be allocated the same settings).
The default for this parameter is sessions*(files+20), where
“sessions” is equal to the number of units (clients) for which you bought your
license and “files” is the maximum number of of files (see files
preference).
Do not set this preference to an unnecessarily high value because this would increase HELIOS Services’ requirement for UNIX system resources.
Specifies the maximum number of workstations (clients)
that are permitted to work on the file server simultaneously.
This value should normally be the same as the total number
of Mac workstations that are connected to the AFP
server. The value you choose should be less than or equal
to the number of sessions allowed by your software license.
The maximum tolerable number of workstations depends
on the type of Mac applications you mostly use (whether
they are file-intensive or client-server applications), on the
configuration of your server system, and on its expansion
stage. The default value for sessions is the number of
sessions allowed by your software license.
Allows the Spotlight search for text document content and image metadata.
Keep in mind that this preference has a server-wide effect so that every AFP volume on the server supports the HELIOS index server search.
Files which start with a dot (“.”) in their file name are marked to be “hidden” for all volumes on connected clients.
This preference specifies the maximum number of files that can be opened by one file server process simultaneously. The achievable maximum cannot exceed the maximum number of open files per process currently allowed by the host. To save system resources, do not set this value larger than set by the “ulimit” UNIX command.
“afpsrv” normally simulates Finder info (such as file type and creator) automatically for files without Mac resource. The file type is determined by inspecting the file’s contents. This allows about 20 different icons to be shown for non-Mac files.
In the case of files created by Windows applications, the file type is typically indicated by adding a suffix to the file name, the so-called file name “extension”. For example, DOS executable programs have the extension “.COM” or “.EXE” and DOS batch files have the extension “.BAT”. Under EtherShare, suitable icons can be displayed for such files by specifying them in the extension mapping table. This is particularly useful in the case of Mac applications which are able to directly read documents created by the MS-DOS version without prior conversion. This preference allows you to specify the location and name of the extension mapping table.
“afpsrv” normally simulates Finder info (such as file type
and creator) automatically for files without Mac resource.
The type of file is determined by inspecting the file’s
contents. This allows about 20 different icons to be shown
for non-Mac files. Set binonly to TRUE
if this feature is not required. This will prevent the
AFP server from reading the header of each non-Mac file to
determine its document type, in which case all non-Mac files
will be treated as type DATA/UNIX. This means that UNIX text
files will then become invisible to most Mac text editors.
The login dialog in Connect to Server... accepts
passwords of any length from 0 byte to max. 8 bytes. Short
passwords may represent a security risk. A password of zero
length is equivalent to no password. Specify minpwlen as a
numeric value between 0 and 8. To improve security, a
meaningful minimum value for this preference is 5.
As a time-saving feature when logging on, the Connect to Server... dialog on
the Mac lets you save your file server user name and/or
user password on the Mac’s local hard disk.
To improve security, set this flag to FALSE
to disable the saving of user passwords in this way, in
which case all users have to enter their password manually
each time they log on to EtherShare.
This preference has only effect for Mac clients prior to OS X.
The file server caches Finder information in RAM memory
to optimize performance. findercache specifies the number
of Finder entries to cache, and thus the amount of RAM
needed that should be allocated for this purpose. Higher
values require more RAM but lead to a file server speed
improvement for some Finder operations.
Each entry requires about 100 bytes of RAM. The cache is used by only one single “afpsrv” (i.e. client) at a time, since it cannot be shared.
Synchronize files to the file system when requested by Apple Time Machine.
The default is FALSE because server volumes are considered
as stable storage, and synchronizing many times per second slows down
the overall server performance.
Whenever you modify a Mac file, the changes you make do not necessarily affect both the data file and resource file, and in many cases only the data file is changed. “afpsrv” only checks the modification date of the data file when it needs to display date and time information in the Finder. However, “afpsrv” does normally not update the modification date of the resource file if only the data fork has been modified. The modification date of the resource file is usually not important, even to incremental backup procedures, and updating it would waste system resources and slow down the file server somewhat. Nonetheless, situations may exist where differences between the modification date of the data and resource files can cause difficulties.
Such situations are typically those involving automatic data migration to slower external storage.
Specify the filedatesync flag to cause “afpsrv”
to always synchronize the modification date of the resource
and data files, even if only the data fork has been modified.
This preference sorts the directories coming from the server to the Mac clients by name.
This preference specifies the permissions for new directories. If not
set or set with the value “0”, it has no effect. If set with a value that
is different from zero it overrides the HELIOS smart permissions as well
as the useunixperm preference (see HELIOS Base manual).
Permissions for all newly created directories: drwxr-x--- (750):
$ prefvalue -k 'Programs/afpsrv/dirmode' -t int 0750
Specifying the permissions similar to the “chmod” command, it is important to add a leading zero to the number:
$ chmod 700 mydir $ prefvalue -k 'Programs/afpsrv/dirmode' -t int 0700
On UNIX systems, directory file permissions (not only of new directories) are also affected by “umask”. If directories are created with unexpected permissions, it it advisable to check the “umask” of “afpsrv”.
In the Mac OS file system only the owner of a folder or volume can permanently change the folder’s layout, e.g. sorting order, icon placement, and label settings. This feature has been added to allow workgroups, e.g. users who are all members of the same group, to change layout settings or labels according to the organization of their work.
By default, “afpsrv” will return the number of offsprings
(entries in a subdirectory) as 9999 when enumerating a
directory. This option can be turned off by using this flag
set to FALSE. Then, the AFP call “GetFileDirParms” on a
directory gives the real number of entries.
This feature is especially useful if folders containing many subfolders, which on their part may contain many files, are in use. The Mac Finder or the application program, will not only request file information in the current folder but also on files in subfolders, although this information is currently not used. Therefore, this option may accelerate the opening and displaying of folders with many subfolders. There are few Mac applications which rely on the exact offspring count. For those, disabling of this preference may be required.
Allows further aggressive caching but is turned off by default because some applications may have problems with it. Affected applications are some JavaScript apps, some Basic apps, and the OS X 10.6 Finder as well as Mac OS 9.
This preference will cause line end translation for all files of type “TEXT”, without regard to creator.
The texttran flag has been added to “afpsrv” in order to
turn off the newline translation for all types of text files.
texttran set to FALSE will disable line
end translation for all files of type “TEXT”, without regard to
creator.
This feature may be helpful in case Mac applications do write binary data into text files.
Starting with Mac OS 9, client applications including “Finder”, do create/copy files on a server volume with a temporary type instead of the final type “TEXT”. Only after writing the file completely, the temporary type is set to the final “TEXT” type. Due to this changed behavior, EtherShare can convert line endings only when they are read from the server, but not when files are stored on the server.
Specifies the time in seconds a Mac client is allowed to stay logged-on to “afpsrv”.
Specifies the AFP port number via TCP/IP.
If port 548 is busy because the Apple file server runs also on this server, “afpsrv” uses a random free port, which is logged in the system messages where you can connect to.
Specifies the maximum size of AFP TCP/IP data packets that are passed from “afpsrv” to workstations through the network during a transaction.
Specifies the time interval in seconds how often “afpsrv” checks the amount of free space on the server.
Specifies (in seconds) how often volstatinterval is
communicated to the Mac client.
Specifies the IP address the “afpsrv” program offers to the Mac clients for logging in via IP-protocol. (If this value remains unspecified, i.e. empty, all IP addresses on all network interfaces are offered.)
This preference is applied for handling more than one IP address, and is given out in a string in which the addresses are specified comma-separated.
This flag switches the AFP TCP/IP on or off, depending on its setting.
Specifies the path of the file containing the access list with the IP addresses which are permitted to log on to “afpsrv”.
If set to TRUE, this preference lets “afpsrv” append
a record to the system messages if, due to the IP access list,
access to one or more users has been denied.
Specifies the time interval in seconds after which “afpsrv” sends a tickle packet to signal that the server is still running.
Specifies the path to the “xfer.log” log file. If set, the file names of all files edited (written, read, saved, etc.) in HELIOS volumes are recorded and stored sequentially in an “xfer.log” file. In general, folder operations (new, move, rename), file moves within a volume, file name changes, and file deletions are not logged. Nor are operations under UNIX or from PC clients.
Use this option with care since it causes considerable load on the server. This information is stored in the “xfer.log” file, in the same format as used by FTP server log files. Each server entry is composed of a single line, consisting of the fields described in the following table, with the fields separated by spaces. If the path to the file “xfer.log” points to the same log file (typically in “/usr/adm”) as used by the FTP server daemon (ftpd(8)), and “ftpd” logging is enabled, then both FTP and “afpsrv” file operations can be recorded in the same log.
Make sure an empty “xfer.log” file exists at the specified location and set file permissions sufficiently so that “owner”, “group”, and “others” can write to that file.
current-timeCurrent local time in the form
DDD MMM dd hh:mm:ss YYYY. Where DDD
is the day of the week, MMM the month,
dd the day of the month, hh the hour,
mm the minutes, ss the seconds, and
YYYY the year
transfer-timeTotal time in seconds for the transfer
remote-hostRemote host name.
file-sizeSize of the transferred file in bytes
filenameName of the transferred file
transfer-typeSingle character indicating the type of transfer. Can be one of:
| a | for an ASCII transfer |
| b | for a binary transfer |
special-action-flagOne or more single character flags indicating any special action taken. Can be one or more of:
| C | file was compressed |
| U | file was uncompressed |
| T | file was tar'ed |
| _ | no action was taken |
directionDirection of the transfer. Can be one of:
| o | outgoing |
| i | incoming |
access-modeMethod by which the user is logged-in:
| a | (anonymus) Anonymus guest user |
| g | (guest) Passworded guest user |
| r | (real) Local authenticated user |
usernameLocal username or if guest, the ID string given
service-nameName of the service being logged, usually AFP
authentication-methodMethod of authentication used. Can be one of:
| 0 | none |
| 1 | RFC931 Athentication |
authentication-user-idUser ID returned by the authentication method. An * is used if an authenticated user ID is not available.
completion-statusSingle character indicating the status of the transfer. Can be one of:
| c | complete transfer |
| i | incomplete transfer |
Setting this preference to TRUE (IP type of service: Low
Delay) will let the host send IP-datagrams for “afpsrv”
processes with higher priority and lower delay compared to
IP-datagrams of other processes which did not set lowdelay.
The exact behavior depends on the protocols configured
queueing discipline.
This preference decides if the AFP server uses extended attributes (“xattrs”) for Finder tags, file metadata, file and folder security information, etc. The attributes are saved as an extra file stream, therefore Mac, Windows and “dt copy” will preserve this additional information when copying files.
Key: Programs/papsrv/<preference>
Address of the master TCP port. All active TCP printers
(printers with active tcpname and TCPPublish flag) can be
reached via this port. If the port number is set to 0 the master
TCP port is deactivated.
Specifies an IP address for the master TCP port. The “papsrv” will listen on this interface for TCP connections to the printers and registers its TCP printers for this address.