Configuring Netatalk In ubuntu

[CompactMacLover]

Ive spent the last 2 hours messing with netatalk on my ubuntu box trying to get it to work

How the heck do ya get it to work, I keep getting errors from the atalkd that says interface not avalable exiting and stuff like that. Im running ubuntu 11.0.4 right now

[PowerPup]

Here's the official guide:
http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.0/htmldocs/configuration.html
Don't know if you've already tried using it. Just thought I'd post it for reference anyway.

You might be able to use some of this guide:
http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/

There's a step where it shows the following:

ATALKD_RUN=no
PAPD_RUN=no
CNID_METAD_RUN=yes
AFPD_RUN=yes
TIMELORD_RUN=no
A2BOOT_RUN=no

You will want to make sure that ATALKD_RUN equals "yes" for Classic AppleTalk.

I need to setup a computer with a linux distribution and make a "Install Netatalk for Dummies" guide for people like me and others who just need something simple to follow that tells us how to setup Netatalk for Classic AppleTalk networking.

Anyway, hope these links will have something that can help you.

Edit: Oh! I just found this little gold nugget:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AppleTalk
That might really come in handy.

[protocol7]

Inspired by gavo's Linintosh server, I'm trying to build a more minimal and up-to-date one here using Debian. I have netatalk 2.2.1 up and running, but it seems that I can only connect over TCP. This is a problem for older systems (a problem I don't have with Linintosh). If I try to connect over AppleTalk I can login and see the shared folder list. But when I try to connect to a folder the chooser hangs for a few minutes and then a dialog box pops up saying "the file server's connection has unexpectedly closed down". Connecting over TCP works perfectly. I have -transall set in afpd.conf.

Any ideas?

[protocol7]

As a follow-up I think the issue was with Netatalk 2.2.1. I dropped down to 2.1.6 (I have no need for Lion Time Machine backup capability) and everything works fine.

[avw]

Recently I got the problem that my Linux gurus are giving up on installing Netatalk at a NSLU2 with OpenWRT. Is there someone out who has this config working?

Only other possibility I see for an Network Storage in mixed environments (Debian, Ubuntu, Mac OS 9) is Samba via DAVE. But DAVE is making my Macs under 9 very unstable, ... any other suggestions for any technologies working under Linux and 9? I would need network volumes that are accessable from the filesystmes itselve. WebDAV only offeres a FTP-style folder that cannot be used from within the applications at Mac OS 9.

[pl212]

I have netatalk 2.2.1 up and running, but it seems that I can only connect over TCP. This is a problem for older systems (a problem I don't have with Linintosh). If I try to connect over AppleTalk I can login and see the shared folder list. But when I try to connect to a folder the chooser hangs for a few minutes and then a dialog box pops up saying "the file server's connection has unexpectedly closed down". Connecting over TCP works perfectly. I have -transall set in afpd.conf.
[...]
As a follow-up I think the issue was with Netatalk 2.2.1. I dropped down to 2.1.6 (I have no need for Lion Time Machine backup capability) and everything works fine.

I've noticed the same problem with Netatalk 2.2.0 on a NAS (Synology DS110j). -transall is set, and AFP/IP works fine, but over DDP (by turning of Open Transport TCP/IP) I get the exact same freeze and message.

My theory is that nobody is actively testing the DDP protocol with modern versions of Netatalk. Instead, people are working on things like Time Machine under Lion, and Zeroconf/Avahi support.

I'll see if I can manually downgrade Netatalk on my NAS to 2.1.6 and report back.

[pl212]

Not exactly a scientifically-controlled test, but I can confirm that sharing over pure AppleTalk DDP works on Netatalk 2.0.3, at least under Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.

My test client is a PowerBook 1400, Mac OS 8.1, AppleShare Client 3.7.4 on top of OpenTransport 1.3.1.

I'll next test against 7.6 and 7.1, and after that start upgrading Netatalk on Ubuntu until I can get it to fail.

At a certain point we may start running into volume size limitations in earlier versions of Mac OS, but there is an option to artificially constrict reported volume size in Netatalk. (Interestingly, this feature was dumbed down in the most recent release of Netatalk to only function with Time Machine Backup volumes, not normal AppleShare volumes. The reasoning was that the code to check the size of all files on disk was too inefficient unless it had access to some special TM features. But on very small volumes, like the ones we might use in vintage computing, it's hard to believe this would be an issue.)

[pl212]

Someone else reporting the same problem with 2.2.1 last month:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=28258710

I see the same error in my logs (Signal 11)

[Mk.558]

I plan on jumping in on this. It'll make the Guide all complete, as all I have for Classic OS against Linux is FTP.

Not exactly a scientifically-controlled test, but I can confirm that sharing over pure AppleTalk DDP works on Netatalk 2.0.3, at least under Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.

Did you follow a specific guide or article for this?

[pl212]

Did you follow a specific guide or article for this?

Nope, just did an install in VMWare with the ISO of Ubuntu 8.04. I specifically held off on any downloaded updates so that I could test a baseline config. Only changes made were to the config files -- type

Code: Select all

afpd -V

to see where they reside on your particular system. (I believe

Code: Select all

-transall

is the default, so it worked out of the box -- automatically serving up each user's home directory.

One thing I did do was to connect my host iMac to wired Ethernet, and set VMWare to Bridged Mode, to eliminate any chance that AppleTalk could be filtered out. (Obviously legacy Macs are going to be on wired Ethernet in most cases.)

[pl212]

Just following up to say that Netatalk 2.0.3 works over DDP with 7.6... with 7.1.1... all the way down to an unenhanced Mac 512 with System 4, Finder 5.4 and AppleShare Client 1.1(booting from a 400k floppy disk with HD20 Init to support HFS). PhoneNet routed through a PowerBook 520 using LocalTalk Bridge.
..I think this safely proves backwards compatibility to the Fall of 1986. Only quirk was the 512 seeing smaller volumes as read-only -- and triggering a Finder crash with multi-gigabyte volumes.

So now I'll start building new revisions of Netatalk, until DDP starts failing with Signal 11 in /var/log/messages. I have a feeling that's going to be about 2.1.x, but we'll see...

[pl212]

I think Netatalk 2.2.2 may actually fix this -- my install of 2.2.0 was failing to support DDP shares, but 2.2.2 works great. (Of course, since this is all dependent on a kernel module, it may be somewhat system-specific.)

8.1 does a great job of dealing with big volumes, and 7.1 seems also to be fine, although it mis-reports big volumes as being 0k in size, and always having 2gigs free space available. (I believe 2gigs was either the HFS or the AFP volume size limit at this point.)

I wouldn't do any critical work on this kind of Netatalk volume from a pre-8 Finder, but as a mainly read-only archive of software installers, it seems to work just fine.

Sharing out a volume that has been purposefully limited works just fine -- I made a virtual 20 meg partition and shared that out to System 7.1, which was able to accurately display the correct number of megabytes in the disk.

[bbraun]

Yes, sorry I missed this thread. netatalk 2.2.0 introduced a directory cache that was used uninitialized for appletalk, causing the afp daemon to crash the first time a client connected. AFP over IP was fine. I reported this with a fix back in November, but it didn't make a release until 2.2.2 in January.

[pl212]

Ah, wonderful to get closure on this, and thanks for submitting the fix! I had trawled the mailing list for netatalk but didn't think to check the git repository.

Out of curiosity, do you have any thoughts on 7.6.x clients and large (> 2gig) shares? I know it somewhat depends on both of OS/Finder versions and the AppleShare Client version... and as I mentioned upthread the "volsizelimit" seems to have been restricted to Time Machine shares only, otherwise it would have been a nice way to handle this.

[bbraun]

I use netatalk from System 7.0.1 quite a bit with a 2TB share, and plan on upping that today actually. I've also noticed the misreported file sizes and volume size, but I have not investigated further. It does not seem to impact my use, so I haven't dug into it.

[Mk.558]

Sounds like I need to get started then. How difficult is it to get setup?