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).