[Gllug] Mac clients/Linux server

[jim smith]

>jim smith wrote:
>
><snip copious useful comments>
>
>Thanks for this, I've been struggling with the same problem for a while.
>We only have six Mac clients so it hasn't been much of a priority so far
>.Oddly enough I ended up using secure ftp as a temporary fix as wel1.


What client are you using? my Mac users want external access, so that 
would be an excellent solution.

I downloaded the CVS version of netatalk yesterday and built it four 
times with different options: each time getting the authentication 
method not supported error. It looks like the developers have put the 
netatalk pam.d information in the wrong place (indeed, i had to 
create the directory or the install script failed.) I'm thinking of 
giving up and finding an alternate method, myself.

netatalk is  a throwback to the bad old days of open source when you 
needed to know some C and shell scripting just to get things working. 
the last three years have been less than edifying with an RPM 
floating around on all the repositories that didn't work on anything 
but the creator's machine and an unfixed bug in the install script 
that stopped anyone who didn't know about it installing netatalk on 
redhat about a year - the maintainers seemed to lose interest every 
three months or so and you'd get someone new along (for an 
understanding of how slow progress has been on netatalk we're at 
version 1.5b and the projected started in 1992).

  the things that drives me up the wall is that the problems are all 
on the linux side: appletalk is a well known protocol and apple don't 
change bits at random to deliberately frustrate OSS developers as 
microsoft did with samba. Instead the problems are always to do with 
differing authentication modules between distributions.

if i could only inject five years of networking and C programming 
into my head Joe 90 style i'd do it myself...

on considered reflection though it's only useful when you need to 
store resource forks and Icon^M files. (i guess the print server is a 
different issue, but i've never worked in a place big enough to 
justify one of those). as data files usually create these but don't 
need them in a web dev environment (photoshop and illustrator files 
are pretty much flat - the resource fork only stores icons and 
previews - while GIFs etc shouldn't ever have resource forks) i'm 
going to move my system to WebDAV, once i can get the authentication 
sorted out. WebDAV works out of the box on OS X and goliath is a 
finder-like replacement for OS 9.

applications, of course, need lots of resource forks - but they can live on CD.

i'm putting all this up on a web page, probably at 
http://www.xoo.org/jim/ because netatalk and its attendant 
frustrations are somewhat underdocumented...

j
-- 



jim smith
07961 319040
Sometimes I wish someone would port grep to everyday life.

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