Netatalk 2.2.7 Released

[avadondragon]

You're welcome. Unfortunately, I learned recently that Debian has lost its Netatalk package manager. In fact, even Netatalk 3 is in danger of being dropped from the upcoming stable Debian release (Bookworm.) So the dream of having Netatalk 2 an apt command away seems distant indeed.

If you want a Netatalk friendly OS you may want to considering joining @hauke and others in NetBSD land.

Oh that's terrible news but not surprising. I've gotten used to having to building a lot of tools I use from source. I played with NetBSD a little. I even installed it on my Powerbook 180c ages ago.

 

[cheesestraws]

FWIW, NetBSD is the best netatalk experience I've had. Dead easy. Respect to @hauke (who IIRC is the package maintainer?)

 

[slipperygrey]

FYI, I was promoted to "developer" of the upstream project, and was given admin privileges of the official website. So over the last week I've been updating the website (netatalk.sourceforge.io), fixing dead URLs etc., as well as making the 2.2 manual current with the state of the software. The manual should now be a good resource for installing and using Netatalk, so please check it out, and let me know if you see more improvement areas!

In fact, I imported the manual's xml docbook sources into the netatalk repo proper, so making improvements to the documentation is only a Github PR away!

BTW, I "hotfixed" the 2.2.7 release tarball now, and it should build out of the box.

 

[Tom2112]

Bear with me, I'm a linux amateur. Anyone know if this will be picked up by the package managers/distro for Raspberry Pis?

 

[slipperygrey]

@Tom2112 I assume you mean the package repo for Raspberry Pi OS (aka Raspbian)? To make this happen someone with the skills and connections will have to take on the role as netatalk package maintainer for Debian. Even the netatalk3 package is currently orphaned, unfortunately.

Alternatively, someone could create a deb package and submit it to a 3rd party contrib repo.

 

[superjer2000]

I've been running Netatalk 2.2.6 on Debian for a few years now (early 2020 from my notes) and had posted about it previously.

I had found a post somewhere (maybe Google groups?) where somebody had noted the issue with 2.2.6 related to two lines of code and by rolling back to the red lines in main.c it would properly work again. (My notes from that indicate otherwise it would note something about the address range being too large).

Does this Netatalk 2.2.7 have any other changes besides the below?

 

[slipperygrey]

@superjer2000 Yes, this was the first patch that I got merged to upstream Netatalk 2.2 back in November of 2021. It fixes routerless AppleTalk (which is what you usually have with a single zone AppleTalk network) on Linux, which was broken when fixing the same for NetBSD. Later on, NetBSD compatibility was restored with this patch.

See the 2.2.7 release notes for a full summary of all the changes between 2.2.6 and 2.2.7. I strongly recommend upgrading, since it fixes a handful of CVE security advisories, and allows you to use OpenSSL 1.1 (or 3.0) rather than the old insecure 1.0. It also brings papd and timelord back to fully functioning states so that you can run printer and time servers for your old Macs.

 

[superjer2000]

@slipperygrey Thanks! Appreciate the extra info.

Now I just need to work myself up to the idea of upgrading. Everything works perfectly now (AppleShare and both my b&w and Color printers are accessible via the Chooser through Cups.). And 11/10 times making any changes will break something! Luckily it’s on a VM so I can roll back if required.

 

[slipperygrey]

@superjer2000 You're welcome! And I know the feeling exactly. The inclination not to fix something if it's not broken.

You're running an older Debian distro too, right? If you're in a private network and not to worried about the implications from running decade-old software with known security holes, plus don't care about the other bug fixes and improvements in 2.2.7, it might not be worth the effort to update everything.

 

[superjer2000]

@superjer2000 You're welcome! And I know the feeling exactly. The inclination not to fix something if it's not broken.

You're running an older Debian distro too, right? If you're in a private network and not to worried about the implications from running decade-old software with known security holes, plus don't care about the other bug fixes and improvements in 2.2.7, it might not be worth the effort to update everything.

That's exactly it. It's Debian Stretch so it's a few versions behind. That Linux install also serves up the TNFS server for my FujiNet as well as files for for my IBM 5150 (EtherDFS and EthFlop) plus a few other things. It is strictly in ringfenced to my private network.

I recently took the plunge to upgrade my ESXi that hosts this server and that was a process. I had been on 6.0 for years and then thought I'd move to something that it's in the vicinity of support. After trying to move to 7 I ending up going to 6.7 but it took a full weekend.

 

[NJRoadfan]

The biggest advantage of newer Debian distros (Buster and newer in particular) is that they come with a newer version of CUPS and cups-filters that supports driverless printing out of the box. Getting netatalk's papd working with any printer you have on the network is literally plug and play (just have to add one line to papd.conf).

 

[ironborn65]

Thanks for this effort @slipperygrey .

Would it be feasible to create a docker container? In case the adoption would be easier.
Another option for modern MacOS users would be a brew cask.
I'm not smart enough with CLI and Unix/Linux to volunteer to provide those distributions.

 

[slipperygrey]

@ironborn65 Happy to create something useful for the community!

My primary goal right now is to figure out how to create a deb package. Debian is the one Linux distro that still comes with AppleTalk support in kernel out of the box, so it makes sense to prioritize this I think.

macOS has *no* AppleTalk support presently so running Netatalk 2 in that OS makes no sense right now. There are people who are porting Netatalk 3 to macOS though!

 

[CC_333]

macOS has *no* AppleTalk support presently so running Netatalk 2 in that OS makes no sense right now.

It could make sense if someone were to somehow port Debian's AppleTalk support (or from someplace else) and implement it as a macOS compatible driver, though, couldn't it?

c

 

[slipperygrey]

It could make sense if someone were to somehow port Debian's AppleTalk support (or from someplace else) and implement it as a macOS compatible driver, though, couldn't it?

c

I think a userland AppleTalk stack is the more feasible approach. There's an epic thread in https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/developing-a-portable-user-land-appletalk-stack.34622/ for instance.

 

[CC_333]

Yeah, that's sort of what I was thinking.

I vaguely remember that thread, but I don't remember if it ever actually got off the ground.

c