netatalk

On Wed, 27 Jul 2011, kuv8vmew62@... wrote:

> Complaining that people are upgrading "too soon" is one thing but 
> concidder this....
>
> If I go into an Apple Store today any Mac that I buy will come with OS X 
> 10.7 Lion installed on it by default. In many cases downgrading to an 
> older version of the OS is not an option as the hardware will not 
> support older versions and Apple will not support you as the owner of 
> the hardware if you install a non-recommended OS.
>
> In my case, my company is scheduled to order 30 new Macs over the next 
> few months and right now NONE of these Lion based Macs will be able to 
> connect to our netatalk based servers. I am now in the position of 
> deciding on alternate server software if Lion cannot connect to our 
> netatalk based servers.
>
> Not a very comfortable place to be as the other options are slower and 
> less flexible.

Can you clarify the issue?  Are you having problems connecting to afpd 
from Lion in general, or only in the context of Time Machine?

 	Andy

kuv8vmew62@... wrote:

>Complaining that people are upgrading "too soon" is one thing but
>concidder this....
>
>If I go into an Apple Store today any Mac that I buy will come with OS X
>10.7 Lion installed on it by default.

So you should consider buying not from Apple directly since other dealers
will still have eg. iMacs which are preinstalled with 10.6.6 (and you get
10.7 by Apple's "up to date" program)

> In many cases downgrading to an older version of the OS is not an option
>as the hardware will not support older versions and Apple will not
>support you as the owner of the hardware if you install a non-recommended
>OS.

Even in case it would work (Mid 2011 iMac for example which runs perfectly
well with MacOS X 10.6.6 - 10.6.8) it won't be easy since you can not
simply use a retail snow leopard DVD due to lack of drivers (the iMac
stuff has been included in 10.6.6).

So always the same: Due to Apple not providing driver support for machines
in 'older' (even a few weeks 'older') OS versions they force you to use
the most up to date OS version on recent hardware.

Since using the most recent OS version especially when it's a 10.x.0 oder
10.x.1 is not the best idea due to bugs in the OS itself and
incompatibilities you *will* run into, the best time to buy new Mac
hardware is just before the release of a new major MacOS X version. Then
you can use a stable OS (10.6.8) and aren't affected by incompatibilities
and inconveniences. Just wait until the issues are resolved and then start
using the new OS (10.x.3/10.x.4). It's that simple and it's common
knowledge too.

>In my case, my company is scheduled to order 30 new Macs over the next
>few months and right now NONE of these Lion based Macs will be able to
>connect to our netatalk based servers.

So you missed the right date to buy new client hardware and are now
complaining about having servers running outdated netatalk versions?

DHX2 authentication works with Netatalk 2.1, you simply have to use it. If
you don't want to use DHX2 then you have to configure the AppleShareClient
in 10.7 to use DHCAST128 instead.

And if you want to use Netatalk servers as a backup target: The necessary
protocol features for stable TimeMachine support are included in Netatalk
2.2 which is available right now.

Which version of Netatalk do you use on your servers? Can you provide us
with the output os "asip-status.pl" running against your servers or "afpd
-V" please?

Regards,

Thomas