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netatalk

Submitted by catmistake on May 5, 2007 - 5:16am. Other Computers

Surprisingly, there's really nothing here about netatalk. Eudimorphodon mentions he was running it with a lot of other services, and... that's it. I figured it'd be pretty popular. But since there's no mention of it, I make this new thread to ensure, at least, that the regulars are aware of its existence (bah, I'm sure you all already are).

small victory (for me) here. I finally got it working with ssl on ubuntu — but I don't quite own it yet, just have it up and running. I can't believe how complex running appletalk is. It takes 4 daemons, and... its a dog, quite a bit slower than real AppleTalk, which has improved its speed a bit since 10.2.x (seems that way, I don't know for sure). Real AppleTalk, I can play a video file across my 54Mbps WLAN without stuttering, but with netatalk, it stutters on the 100BaseT LAN. It could be that toshiba drive in the tp A22m (yes, its a ThinkPad ubuntu server now) that's the bottleneck, I think its 4200rpm... but that still has to be almost 20MB/s or more sustained rate, right (its ATA/33 connection)? The stuttering video files are only 350mb, so I don' t know what the trouble is.

So... looking for bester alternatives...

I think there a net protocol that does a secure network mount on port 22 with sshd — what is that? Does it integrate well with OS X clients?

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catmistake's picture

another question

Submitted by catmistake on May 5, 2007 - 3:45pm.

Is there such thing as a fail-over file server? Multi-Mirroring file server?
I have a many unreliable machines I can throw at a project aimed simply at backing up OS X home directories, and (if my logic is wrong, please say so) I'm hoping that, say, 10 unreliable machines mirroring each other might equal a single reliable machine with multiple failover strategies (like redundant PSUs & RAID).

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Eudimorphodon's picture

Re: netatalk

Submitted by Eudimorphodon on May 5, 2007 - 6:36pm.
catmistake wrote:
Surprisingly, there's really nothing here about netatalk. Eudimorphodon mentions he was running it with a lot of other services, and... that's it.

I guess I'm still running it, although it's of rather limited use to me anymore. I've never had much luck getting OS X clients to get along with it. Samba with all its warts seems more reliable, particularly with Tiger. It's great for getting OS 9 or older machines onto your file server. (If your goal is to do unholy things like transferring files directly from your A/UX box onto your file server so you can edit them with with a program running in a Basilisk II session *also* connected over the network Netatalk *rocks*.) However, I get the distinct impression that the maintainers have sort of lost interest in keeping it "modern" (by Apple's standards) anymore.

As to performance I've never noticed a problem with it, but I don't suppose I would have when I've used it almost exclusively with 68040 (real or emulated) clients. I will say I've noticed that generically my OS X Powerbook seems to suck as a network client over wireless. I've been fooling around with streaming .mp4 movies over a Cisco 802.11g WAP, and while the Linux machine hooked to the TV in the living room has no problem making it through a movie without complaining my Powerbook (1.33Ghz G4) inevitably starts skipping about a minute in and never recovers. This is using SAMBA as the transport. I suppose it could just be lousy reception of course, but it's totally consistent no matter how close to the WAP I am.

--Peace

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iantm's picture

When I was younger, my father

Submitted by iantm on May 5, 2007 - 7:08pm.

When I was younger, my father set up netatalk on his linux box so my macs could make use of the large drives. Of course, this was back in 1997-2000 when I was using a PowerBook 180 (asante sc-en adapter), Quarda 610, and ultimately a Power Mac 7200/90 and PowerBook 1400c/166 as my primary computers.

By the time I got a Performa 6400, it had onboard ata - so big drives were cheap and easy to install. At that point, netatalk was less useful to me. I also had a Quadra 650 with powerpc card & a 4gb scsi external drive acting as a retrospect server. (was running 8.1)

God, I can hardly remember how things were back then.

» - iantm
ACDT & ACPT
MacBook Pro 15" 1.83 ghz
07 focus zx3
Cannondale M700

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catmistake's picture

links

Submitted by catmistake on May 5, 2007 - 7:22pm.

sourceforge netatalk page

ubuntu step by step

Once I found these instructions, I didn't have trouble getting it to work. k from Finder, afp://server.local, and it asks for the p/w without the "sent in the clear" warning.

Its understanding what its doing that is my trouble, and configuration isn't obvious or something I can bluff through. I spoke to a learned friend and he explained that the performance hit could be due to netatalk's chattiness. He also said its good software (meaning relatively stable). I'm just passing that along because I just don't know about it yet. But I'm thinking... if I use it to rsync/mirror directories in the background for my clients, for backup purposes only, it will probably be fine, but it may or may not be too slow to work directly off the mount, esp with multiple clients connected.

Quote:
I think there's a net protocol that does a secure network mount on port 22 with sshd — what is that? Does it integrate well with OS X clients?

I still need an answer on this... did I just dream it up?

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eeun's picture

I'm running netatalk on my Ub

Submitted by eeun on May 5, 2007 - 7:30pm.

I'm running netatalk on my Ubuntu server, and rarely need to use it.

The install was very simple, using apt-get, then adding my shares to /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.local.

Granted, it's not running with ssl, but my setup doesn't require it - at least not at the moment. As with Eudi's setup, my OS X is happy enough with Samba.

The alternative was to run an ftp server on the, er...server, and my pre-os x machines would access that instead of shares.

» It's all pants.
3 stories posted
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catmistake's picture

secure p/w?

Submitted by catmistake on May 6, 2007 - 1:25am.

I had installed it previously, but p/w was sent in the clear... I didn't care for that.
The step by step above has slightly different instructions, well, the same, here's what I did:
first,
sudo ls
just so I wouldn't get prompted again for my password, then:

Quote:
mkdir -p ~/src/netatalk && cd ~/src/netatalk && sudo aptitude install devscripts cracklib2-dev dpkg-dev libssl-dev && apt-get source netatalk && sudo apt-get build-dep netatalk && cd netatalk-2.0.3 && DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=ssl sudo dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc && sudo debi
and a flurry of stuff rolling by... and then no warnings when I try to connect.

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catmistake's picture

humbled

Submitted by catmistake on May 7, 2007 - 10:04pm.

ok, bah! The install doesn't include automatic startup scripts...

Any charitable guru, please give some instruction on setting up my netatalk install to start up on boot. (nothing wrong with manually starting, I suppose... but I'd prefer it start at whatever opportune moment during boot).

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There is another appletalk im

Submitted by Remiel on May 10, 2007 - 6:24pm.

There is another appletalk implementation, the "Columbia Appletalk Package" or CAP for short. It was a semi commercial UNIX app but there is a license for end users to use it for free. Sadly, the university page that hosted it seems to be down. But I'm sure there are mirrors of the software. They had a tonne of apps for Mac and UNIX alike.

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