I’m a fan of Unix operating systems in general.  That’s what got me interested in switching to Mac OS X because it’s Unix-based.  It was inevitable that I would eventually get a server-class machine again that wasn’t Mac-based.  The new Dell machine that I have running has Ubuntu 8.10 – a Debian-based machine which is something I’m new too.

I wanted to set up the Ubuntu machine to share files with the Macs on my network but not by using the crappy Samba protocol or even NFS.  I know both are troublesome and not as speedy on a Mac.  My only other choice was to get AFP working on the Ubuntu server and to my delight, packages exist for this.  Netatalk is an Appletalk daemon and Avahi is a Bonjour zeroconf equivalent.  Installing those packages and starting the services didn’t do it for me.  Leopard was having issues with the cleartext passwords being passed to AFPD so I went nowhere.

I did some digging and realized that OpenSSL isn’t GNU and therefore support for it in netatalk isn’t compiled in.  Not being super familar with how Debian packaging works, I looked for a guide to help me with recompiling and installing the updated netatalk package.

I found it and boy it’s an awesome guide.

http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/

Take a look, try it out.  It worked perfectly me for on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10).