What is the technical reason why DDP AppleTalk doesn't work with WiFi?

You might want to create a new thread for this. Something is blocking the traffic or atalkd is misconfigured. As a side note, you don't actually need the RPi to be an access point. Appletalk communications between two WiFi machines on the same access point works fine, its only when the packets cross onto an Ethernet network that they can be mangled. I had my Powerbook G4 and RPi both connected via WiFi to a "broken" router and AppleTalk worked fine.

Is there a list of AARP Phase 2 SNAP frame compatible Wi-Fi routers?

apple airports will probably work, as will older stuff... I believe some buffalo airstation models do.

AirPorts work great.

There are a lot of AirPort models. Are we sure all of them work? Is there a list of buffalo models? Thanks!

probably. i'm sure buffalo has a list on their website.

Yes. Sorry I was not clear. A list of CONFIRMED AARP-2 compatable buffalo and Air Port models?

bmwcyclist said:

There are a lot of AirPort models. Are we sure all of them work? Is there a list of buffalo models? Thanks!

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All work. I have the last gen forming the backbone of my network, and they work fine. All earlier ones will, too.

I can confirm that a Buffalo AirStation WHR-HP-G54 can do AppleTalk. I bought mine very cheaply.

Thank you!

These were tested for AARP?

Any router running ddwrt or OpenWRT should work. In theory any router running Linux should work properly as well as the kernel can properly route AARP packets between WiFi and Ethernet.

GL.inet's entire router line runs OpenWRT and are pretty affordable.

Ubiquiti APs + OpenWRT ethernet router working great here.

Surprised the Ubiquiti AP supports AARP properly given the track record of their routers with DDP traffic.

NJRoadfan said:

Surprised the Ubiquiti AP supports AARP properly given the track record of their routers with DDP traffic.

Click to expand...

It just magically started working for me at some point, I was surprised too.

I haven't tried everything but I can browse the network to discover devices and mount AFP over DDP.

I've been struggling with Appletalk under System 7.x when using the emulated Dayna SCSI/Link device in ZuluSCSI (problem might exist in BlueSCSI as well, but I do not own one). A real SCSI/Link hardware interface (connected to my ethernet network) shows Appletalk Zones in the bottom left of the Chooser dialog and remote volume mounts persist across reboot. The emulated interface in ZuluSCSI does NOT show any zones in the Chooser and remote volumes do not persist across reboot (although they work fine if manually re-established for the current session). It's possible there's something not quite right with the SCSI/Link emulation, but I strongly suspect this is a side-effect of the ZuluSCSI hardware using Wifi for network connection.

My household router is a TP-Link Archer AX73 which may not handle DDP packets correctly when passing from wifi to ethernet. After reading through this thread, I setup a GL.inet STF1200 pocket router (running OpenWRT) and tried connecting through that. No difference. The Chooser never shows any Zones and connections do not persist.

Is it possible that OpenWRT needs configuration to manage DDP packets correctly? If so, what and where do I tweak?

Run a packet sniffer on the Ethernet segment of the network and filter out the AARP packets. If they appear as Ethernet II frames instead of SNAP frames, then the router or ZuluSCSI is mangling the packets. No tweaks are needed for OpenWRT or ddwrt. The code that handles the packet transformation from WiFi to Ethernet resides in the Linux kernel.

Its also possible that packets coming from the Wifi interface are being mangled when hitting the ZuluSCSI somehow. I don't know the specifics of the Dayna emulation to tell you if that is possible.

I'll give that a try. It's been a long time since I've used Wireshark, but hopefully I can fight my way through!

My bet is on the RPi Pico network stack being the culprit. If that turns out to be the case I doubt there's any remedy possible.

Sorry to butt into a topic I know very little about and I doubt this really adds much. But I finally got my Powerbook G3 Pismo connected via wifi on Mac OS9 - (OrinicoGold PCMCIA card using Airtalk native drivers). It's connected via WEP (I'm quite rural) to a WRT54GSv1 running DD-WRT (latest build as of 31Oct2025). I'm using almost the default settings (turned off WAN/DHCPD, changed SSID and added WEP). I've read on here that Appletalk packets rarely cross a wifi connection (although I've never really read to understand why). So I was quite surprised to see that I can connect to my Appletalk zone just fine (...and even see many other zones via Globaltalk).

DD-WRT uses the Linux kernel, which properly routes AARP packets between WiFi and Ethernet.