Comment by GeekyBear

20 hours ago

It's been more than a decade since they replaced AFP with SMB as the default protocol for file sharing, and they've been warning that AFP would be going away for years.

Yeah but AFP is still performing way better than SMB on Mac for any fast networking. Like 10GigE and faster. Apple SMB stack is a disaster, and thoroughly unprofessional. NFS is faster, too, but unfortunately the Finder, being the rat nest of bugs it is, has often trouble with NFS shares.

  • macOS 26 still has a hard kernel panic if you try to mount an NFS share with krb5 auth but don’t have a valid Kerberos ticket. 100% reproducible.

    Every OS update I try mounting with no ticket, get a panic, fill in the error reporting dialog with a nice “hope you had a nice holiday break!” message or whatever is seasonally appropriate, with the same simple steps to reproduce. It’s just kinda comical at this point.

    My guess is kerberized NFS has absolutely zero users within Apple, and it’s likely hard to find an engineer there who even knows what Kerberos is anymore.

    I used to work at Apple and I’d have filed a radar for it but now I’m just a customer so I’m powerless.

    • Hah. I actually had opendirectory, OSX clients, and CentOS/RedHat clients running krb5 NFS off of netapp filers circa … 2008? Lots and lots of NFS in the (mansfield) hardware org at that time. I think krb on osx started getting hard around 2010 when they moved tickets and other credentials to a process aware in memory store. Became difficult to use TGT or machine identity for automation.

      And yes, Im sure theres a very lonely radar bug for this. But even MM of revenue wont fix “edge cases” like this.

    • It's been a while since I worked at Apple, but back in the day the entire OS X Server team made extensive use of kerberized NFS shares for moving around large files...

      ...the last version of Server shipped in 2021 (and the last real version shipped almost a decade before that).

      2 replies →

  • IIRC I had some really nasty move/duplication issues with NFS the last time I tried it in Finder.app. (and the whole UID mess)