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Network Accounts- what is better: SMB or AFP for clients to connect?

I

iansilv

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 2, 2007
1,101
411
I am running a small network in my office with all mac clients- all iMacs actually. I have run in to some stability issues with the accounts crashing safari, not being able to login, hanging, etc.

What is the best connection protocol for the network home folders? I have them set to SMB, any reason to switch to AFP?
 
satcomer said:
Depends! Apple started dropping AFP for SMB about 2-3 years ago. Do if those Mac clients are running OS X 9.0 or better then use SMB 2.

Read some fixes in the blog post Fixing Windows OS X FileSharing Slowness SMB2.

For connecting to NAS clients just use the cifs//ip-or-server name .
Click to expand...
Apple has not dropped AFP whatsoever. They've switched SMB to be the default for file sharing, but for network homes, AFP is likely to work less badly than SMB.
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iansilv said:
I am running a small network in my office with all mac clients- all iMacs actually. I have run in to some stability issues with the accounts crashing safari, not being able to login, hanging, etc.

What is the best connection protocol for the network home folders? I have them set to SMB, any reason to switch to AFP?
Click to expand...
Network homes in general are not particularly reliable. I would use AFP over SMB if I had to do it, though. Any sort of network instability or slowdowns are going to cause reliability problems, so you definitely do not want to be using network homes over wifi.
 
iansilv said:
Sorry man... What's "CIFS" stand for?...
Click to expand...
It's a (different) Windows file sharing protocol. You can't specify CIFS in Server.app when configuring network homes so the idea of using it for this is irrelevant. CIFS stands for "Common Internet File System".
Stick with AFP if you must use network homes in this environment.
 
Ok thank you everyone. I'm going to redo everything to use afp and hopefully that will solve the reliability issues...
 
Alright to follow up here, the user accounts have bene recreated fresh with a folder in the root of the hard drive not eh server next to users, and using AFP and so far, not a single problem. So I think this is the most table way to do local network accounts at least as of 10.11.4.
 
i thought smb2 was required for time machine now or was it afp?
i use afp on my readynas units because it just seems the performance on the mac seems faster / or more reliable
i recall that all readynas units needed new firmware because of a networking change on os x, but i forget now if it was samba or afp they changed


a real time capsule uses AFP for file sharing. so much for phasing out, NYA NYA

i clicked on a random file on my Apple Time Capsule and it says this
afp://time capsule._afpovertcp._tcp.local/Data/Wrestling

so there
 
Last edited:
We had quite a few issues with Network Homes on SMB with Yosemite and El Capitan. Switching to AFP also resolved all of the issues for us, we did this switch over several months ago if that helps.
We're now using AFP to connect to the shared folders too and all seems to be working well.
 
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