[GLLUG] Anybody have experience with NETATALK

[David D]

We have a server that does not want to play nice with our MAC OS 9 machines.

I will let a coworker explain:
Our Art Department has been accessing their Macintosh files on a dedicated
Linux server for several weeks without any problems. They are currently
using OS9 and therefore need to connect using Appletalk (Netatalk). The
users are all logging in to the server using the same userid of artdept and
the same password. Originally their data was moved off a Windows server and
placed in the /home folder of the user artdept. (Not my choice. I wanted to
place the data in a /home/data share. Once the Art Dept is migrated to OSX
in the next couple of weeks we will move the data to that location. In the
meantime everyone logs in as artdept to get to that user's home folder and
their data.)


Beginning on Wednesday of this week several users in that department started
experiencing the following problem. They could log in to the Linux server,
but couldn't see any files and their Macintosh said there were zero objects.
Other users who were logged in at the same time had no problem seeing the
files. The only temporary fix we could come up with was to get everyone
logged off, stop Atalk, run the following ( find /home -regex
'.*AppleDB/\(.*db\|__db.*\)' -exec rm '{}' ';' ) and then start Atalk. Users
can then access their files for a while, but after a short period of time
the problem begins to appear again.


In the /var/log/messages file we keep getting the following errors:


CNID DB initialized using Sleepycat Software: Berkeley DB 4.2.52: (June 30,
2004)

linux afpd[12735]: adddir: Incorrect parameters passed to cnid_add

We have given the /home/artdept/.Apple.DB file full access rights for owner,
group and others.

Following is the text from the /etc/netatalk/netatalk.conf file :

# Appletalk configuration
# Change this to increase the maximum number of clients that can connect:
AFPD_MAX_CLIENTS=50

# Change this to set the machine's atalk name and zone.
# NOTE: if your zone has spaces in it, you're better off specifying
# it in afpd.conf
#ATALK_ZONE=@zone
ATALK_NAME=`echo ${HOSTNAME}|cut -d. -f1`

# specify this if you don't want guest, clrtxt, and dhx
# available options: uams_guest.so, uams_clrtxt.so, uams_dhx.so,
# uams_randnum.so
#AFPD_UAMLIST="-U uams_clrtxt.so,uams_randnum.so"

# Change this to set the id of the guest user
AFPD_GUEST=nobody

# Set which daemons to run (papd is dependent upon atalkd):
ATALKD_RUN=yes
PAPD_RUN=yes
AFPD_RUN=yes
TIMELORD_RUN=no

# Control whether the daemons are started in the background
ATALK_BGROUND=yes