Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Questions and Answers: Part 1

Response to some Server inquiries: Part 1

I wrote an article about some problematic items within Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which you can read here. The article isn’t the important part.  I received a comment from Cy Starkman requesting some more information with a series of questions. I’ll address a couple of them here.

“1) AFP – does it manage user connections properly, actually dropping users that are disconnected. Does spotlight work for clients.”

Snow Leopard server does actually drop the client as shown from this snippet of the Access log.

IP 192.168.X.X – – [18/Sep/2009:23:57:27 -0600] “Idle Disconnect: waynedixon” 0 0 0
IP 192.168.X.X – – [18/Sep/2009:23:57:27 -0600] “Saved for Reconnect User: waynedixon” 1252279181 84 0

The user has been disconnected, however they do still appear in the Connections Tab of Server Admin’s AFP service as shown below.

10.6-Server-AFP-Asleep-Disableduser

So that does actually work.

To answer the second half “Does spotlight work for clients.” It sure doesn’t appear so. What I have noticed is that the spotlight index seems to be loaded up on first login and does not search any files that have been added to the users network home drive are not able to be searched until the next login. I hope that this is only a temporary bug and that Apple fixes this soon.

I'm into everything technology related, particularly anything Apple related. I enjoy programming and tend to lean towards server-based technologies over client-based. You can contact me on twitter, via e-mail, or follow me on friendfeed.