Netaman, the simplistic netatalk manager script, allows you to easily configure a Ubuntu Server 9.10 system as an AFP server compatible with default installations of Mac OS X 10.4 or better. UPDATE: I’ve tested this with Ubuntu Server 10.04 and it works perfectly. You may need to enable the source repositories however. You can do so by editing /etc/apt/sources.list and uncommenting lines starting with #deb-src.
By default, netatalk is unable to talk with Mac OS X 10.4+ systems because it doesn’t have the required encryption compiled in. Netaman takes care of the work of downloading everything required to rebuild netatalk with proper encryption support and configure avahi-daemon, an implementation of Bonjour, to announce the availability of your new Linux based AFP server on your local network.
Before you can use netaman you must have an available Ubuntu Server 9.10 system and internet access. Netaman will take care of everything else!
The current version of netaman is 0.1. Here is how you install and use netaman:
- From the console of your Linux system, or through ssh, download the netaman-0.1.tgz located at http://blog.dustinrue.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/netaman-0.1.tgz
- Extract the files using ‘tar zcvf netaman-0.1.tgz
- cd into netaman-0.1
- Run ./netaman and pick option 1.
- Allow the script the run. You may be asked about configuration a mail server. Simply press tab to highlight the OK button and press enter. Choose “No Configuration” and press enter again.
- When script finishes it will display “Setup complete!” Setup is now complete
You should now be able to see your Linux system shown in the Finder sidebar (Leopard and Snow Leopard) with the hostname you chose during the install of your Ubuntu system. Click it and then click the “Connect As..” button. Enter in your username and password for your Ubuntu system. You will then be able to access the home directory on your Ubuntu system.
Future versions of the script will include a simplistic way to manage AFP shares. If you want to try adding shares on your own simply edit the /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default file. It was well documented so you shouldn’t have too much trouble creating more shares.
A big thanks to this blog post http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/ for inspiring me to make this script.
I’d like to thank you very much for this useful script. It helped me a lot.
One small point you may wish to add to this post is that the source repositories must be included, otherwise the script can’t perform the compilations.
I had to add this line:
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu maverick main restricted universe multiverse
to /etc/apt/sources.list, do an apt-get update and then run your script again. It worked like a charm. Thanks again,
Yitzhak