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Comment by petecooper | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, I've been migrating macOS client networks away from macOS Server for a few years. The preferred solution is an HPE MicroServer with Linux (typically Ubuntu LTS) with `netatalk` and various trimmings (`avahi` etc). Bonus points are garnered for a Time Machine option, too.

The icing on the cake is the clients can also choose their "Mac" server icon for Finder:

http://simonwheatley.co.uk/2008/04/avahi-finder-icons/

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I have a NAS with both SMB and AFP (netatalk-based) support, and despite Apple deprecating AFP, it's is still faster and more stable than Apple's SMB support. I guess the Apple devs who made that stuff in the 90's knew what they were doing...

> it's is still faster and more stable than Apple's SMB support.

Anything is faster and more stable than Apple's SMB support. MacOS is horribly slow and buggy with almost every modern NAS. Fixes include enabling SMB 1.0 (WTF?).

Cross post from elsewhere on this thread:

Apple's SMB support does indeed suck, but if you need to use macs as SMB clients, tuning the SMB client config ("man nsmb.conf") can dramatically improve performance! It's night and day for me when I force a newer protocol, increase the cache size, turn off signing/verification (if acceptable given my network conditions), and increase the async read/write counts.

Unfortunately, Gen8 microserver requires proprietary driver for it's RAID controller (for SATA-2!) and fan control; and Gen10 doesn't support hotplug for drives.

This is also supported on FreeNAS and works like a charm.

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