These may seem like stupid questions, but I haven't been able to find the answer anywhere.
Stupid questions are often some of the best ones.
I've got a Linux Mint PC running as my home server with Netatalk 3.1.12 installed from the distro packages. Last summer it worked fine with Mac OS 9. Now Mac OS 9 no longer sees the server and when trying to connect with the IP address there's a login error. After reading threads here and info elsewhere, I determined that it's a good idea to use this version of Netatalk 2.2.9 for my older machines.
This is not right. Netatalk 3.1.x should be perfectly capable of having OS9 clients authenticate with it. If it worked before and stopped working, it could be that your afp.conf changed unexpectedly and no longer loads an OS9 compatible UAM (authentication method.)
The one other suggestion that springs to mind is that your Mint system may have gotten upgraded to OpenSSL 3.0, which broke compatibility with the DHX UAM, which is the default and preferred authentication method for OS9. See
https://github.com/Netatalk/netatalk/issues/358 for the discussion.
A workaround in either case is to enable either the clrtxt or randnum UAMs which are less cryptographically secure but more compatible.
Before I do this, these are the questions I haven't been able to find answers to:
- I have current macOS Macs, older Mac OS X Macs, and classic Macs. If I switch from 3.1.12 to 2.2.9 am I going to lose features for the newer Macs, i.e. file sharing (speed, compatibility, whatever) and Time Machine? My older Mac OS X machines work much better with AFP than they do SMB, so it's clear that I can't be SMB reliant for those.
- Is it better to have separate machines, one running 3.1.12 for the newer Macs and another running 2.2.9 for the classic Macs?
Thanks.
I wrote
this summary in the netatalk FAQ that outlines the differences between 2.2 and 3.1. Spotlight support and improved interoperability with Samba are the two main selling points of 3.1 in my opinion. Time Machine support was introduced with netatalk 2.0.5.
Under the hood, one major difference between 2.2 and 3.1 is how they store Mac file system metadata by default. 3.1 uses macOS style EA metadata, while 2.2 defaults to classic AppleDouble v2. In theory you can convert between the two, but in reality this is a bit of a mess and you easily end up with invalid data that crashes netatalk. So in short I wouldn't recommend trying to use an existing shared 3.x volume with 2.x, or vice versa.
You can certainly run both 2.2.x and 3.1.x on two different machines in the same network and get the best of both worlds. Why don't you try it out while you're getting used to 2.2.x? I personally think 2.2.x is adequate 99% of the time, but your mileage may vary depending on which features you care about.