Essential Mac OS X Panther Server Administration

Chapter 14. File Services Overview

Although the trend is slowly changing with the tremendous diversity of features that Mac OS X Server now provides, Apple server products have traditionally focused strongly on file services. Often displaced in the mid-1990s, as Windows servers broadened their reach into more and more of the niche markets that Apple focused on at the time, these services are poised to make a real comeback in the 10.3 and 10.4 timeframe, with a deepening featureset and an underlying OS that is relatively secure and robust.

Mac OS X Server seeks to be a universal file service platform, and is capable of serving a single filesystem out over AFP, SMB, NFS, and FTP (Apple Filing Protocol, Server Message Block, Network File System, and File Transfer Protocol, respectively). This section devotes an in-depth chapter to each of these services after touching on Share Point, Automount and Home Directory management in this introductory text.

Share Points

A Share Point (or share) is a portion for the Server’s filesystem that has been made available to network clients using a file-sharing protocol. The focus of Mac OS X Server’s File Sharing capabilities is its ability to easily manage multiple protocols across any given share point. Management of share points takes place primarily in Workgroup Manager’s Sharing section (illustrated in Figure 14-1). Here share points are defined, service-specific share point options are specified, and Network Mounts (automatically mounted network ...