Topic: Netatalk and Mac OS X

[Michael Steidley]

I recently update a couple of workstations to Mac OS X and found that there was a problem with accessing the file sharing on my e-smith 4.1.2 server.

It's strange that I can use the volumes that are on SCSI drives but not the ones that are on IDE drives. I get a -43 error on the Mac (file not found) when trying to copy in either direction.

After looking through the discussions on Apple's site, I realised that a lot of people have that same problem with all varieties of linux servers.

They recommend using "netatalk-1.4b2+asun2.1.4-pre37b" to fix this problem.

In the meantime I will try to get the newer version running, but will e-smith be updated any time soon resolve this problem?

[Dave Scarbrough]

I recently read in Linux Journal (August 2001) that OSX's implentation of AppleTalk pretty much sucks.  It is not compliant with Apple's own AppleTalk in OS 7-9.1.  The writer was installing LinuxPPC and in the first couple paragraphs he was complaining about this AppleTalk issue with OSX.  I don't think that Netatalk (either version, same as what's been out for over a year or two) is the problem here.  I can pretty much guarantee that our office will not be moving to OSX any time soon.

[Michael Steidley]

I understand the problem isn't with netatalk. Apple has essentially re-written the spec for AppleTalk and introduced some bugs in the current version.

There was a lot of feedback in Apple's OS X discussion area about that specific version of netatalk working with OS X's implementation of the AppleTalkIP client.

The difference between these two versions is enough that volumes on servers with IDE drives can not be accessed by OS X clients:

netatalk-1.4b2+asun2.1.3-6es
netatalk-1.4b2+asun2.1.4-pre37b

Any positve feedback about the possibility of having this version or better in the next version of e-smith?