Re: [Netatalk-admins] Netatalk from Linux to Mac over TCP/IP

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On Tuesday, July 22, 2003, at 4:49PM, Thomas Kaiser wrote:

> On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 18:32:42 -0500 (CDT), Ashok Aiyar wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Thomas Kaiser wrote:
>>
>>> With AFP 3.0 and above, it has been renamed from "AppleTalk Filing  
>>> Protocol"
>>> into "Apple Filing Protocol" and TCP/IP is the only transportation  
>>> mechanism
>>> that's available due to the small packet sizes of AppleTalk that  
>>> aren't
>>> capable of carrying the long UTF-names.
>>
>> Thomas,
>>
>> Could you clarify this for me?  My recollection is that maximum size  
>> of
>> a DDP packet is 586 bytes.  That is not as large as a TCP/IP packet,
>> but is still pretty good size.  Is this really not big enough for long
>> UTF-names?
>
> Well, Leland wrote that some time ago...
>
>     <http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=netatalk&m=99972896631494&w=2>
>
> So it seems that 255 byte long UTF-names will result in packets larger  
> than
> 610 bytes... Which puzzles me a bit, because I thought in the  
> meantime, the
> name length limitation would be 255 bytes, resulting in file names  
> from 85
> up to including 255 chars depending on the used encoding...

A bit more clarification :-)
In AFP 3.x the FPRename and FPExchangeFiles  calls take two filenames  
of 255 utf-8 bytes,
which puts us close to the 578 byte limit (520 & 527 respectively). In  
the future we will
probably be adding new commands and we didn't want to be constrained by  
the
578 byte limit.  Also the corporate direction is to move away from  
AppleTalk to TCP/IP.

All in all, we felt that dropping support for AppleTalk with AFP 3.0  
was the best thing to do.

Hope this helps
Leland

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Leland Wallace          Working in          AppleShare Engineering
ra...@ap...   but not speaking for  Apple Computer Inc.
http://homepage.mac.com/randall
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