Getting Started

Getting Started with Netatalk

After following the OS specific installation guides, you should now have netatalk installed on your system.

By default, netatalk will share the home directories of each users on the host system, using the DHX and DHX2 user authentication modules.

Comprehensive documentation on how to harness the full power of netatalk can be found in the Configuration chapter of the manual, and the afp.conf man page.

This wiki pages contains a handful of simple examples for getting started with a baseline configuration, which may serve as a starting point for your deployment.

Check

Check features and paths:

netatalk -V
afpd -V

Notably, this will tell you the exact location of the afp.conf configuration file.

Setting

Edit afp.conf – see above for the location.

Ex:

[Global]

[Homes]
basedir regex = /home

[Test Volume]
path = /export/test1
volume name = Test Volume

[Backup Volume]
path = /export/timemachine
volume name = My Time Machine Volume
time machine = yes

Network configuration

You should check that your firewall allows TCP traffic.

AFP's port number is 548. Zeroconf's port number is 5353.

Extended attributes

It's recommended to enable extended attributes of the filesystem, if not already enabled by default. On most contemporary Unix-like operating systems, it is enabled by default, for instance with the btrfs file system.

If you use ext2, 3 or 4, you can check it through getfattr and setfattr commands.

If you use ACL, you should check it by getfacl and setfacl commands.

If these are disabled, use tune2fs command or edit the /etc/fstab file.

Ex:

/dev/sdc2    /mountpoint    ext4    defaults,user_xattr,acl    0 2

Spotlight Feature

If you want to use Spotlight feature, set spotlight = yes.

Set spotlight = no for Time Machine's volume. The mining for sparsebundle is wasteful.

Ex:

[Global]
spotlight = yes

[Homes]
basedir regex = /home

[Test Volume]
path = /export/test1
volume name = Test Volume

[Backup Volume]
path = /export/timemachine
volume name = My Time Machine Volume
time machine = yes
spotlight = no