Removal of technology: Services for Macintosh (SFM)

Removal of technology: Services for Macintosh (SFM)

This seems a little strange and SFM is being talked about on this blog. Well, SFM is one of the technologies that we support along with UNIX Interoperability components like NFS, NIS and SUA.

Anyways, this is not news and people who have used SFM would have noticed by now that SFM is not part of Windows Server 2008 and later releases. This technology has been in the maintenance mode since long and didn't change much since the Windows NT 4.0 days. Nevertheless, it was a very useful component and even today we come across a lot of customers leveraging it for Mac intoperability.

Removal of SFM - in a way paves - way for NFS to be used from Mac clients since Mac OS X comes with a NFS client. it also means that if you are using SFM now and have plans to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 - it's time that you derive a backup plan.

What can you do now?
You can switch to 3rd party AFP servers available out there if you have Mac applications that still look for resource forks. To the best of my knowledge - even though SMB is capable of handling alternate data streams such as resource forks found on Mac systems - the SMB client that ships with Mac OS X doesn't handle it well and splits the forks as separate files when copying. The NFS protocol is not an option since it doesn't handle the altername data streams as well.