Is Netatalk gone or just mostly gone?

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hi there,

Following this guide: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/nas/netatalk_configuration I'm trying to set up an eSATA-connected drive on my Nighthawk R7800 to act as a Time Machine repository. I just installed 23.05-RC3 and got the following errorr:

Unknown package 'netatalk'.
Collected errors:
 * opkg_install_cmd: Cannot install package netatalk.

I doubt this package has disappeared - but maybe Netatalk isn't yet available for 23.05? Does anyone know, thanks!

ADM

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3 Likes
3

Thanks! So nowadays, should I use that or Samba? Not sure how to proceed.

4

It depends on your environment and needs.
For me personally, SFTP is the most suitable option:
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/nas/sftp.server

5

samba/ ksmbd would probably be the closest equivalents; sftpd is always an alternative, somewhat easier to set up, but slower and (on the client side) often less integrated into commercial operating systems.

6

Perhaps I'm not conveying this idea clearly enough - I have a Mac and I want to use Time Machine built in the OS to do backups to an eSATA-connected disk on my router.

Would SAMBA be the preferred network protocol or Netatalk?

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Samba, apple has depreciated use of AppleTalk for Time Machine

1 Like
8

Too bad!! I hearty group is still keeping AFP maintained, and there remain many uses for it on both modern and classic Macs.

9

I can see the use on classic macs, but what is the use case for modern (OSX 10.4 onwards) machines?
That smb / cifs or NFS don't cater to?

10

I know this is old, but not that old.

As for why we still need netatalk, it was only after 10.14 or so that MacOS supports TimeMachine over SMB shares.

We have a 10.13 Mac that can't have the OS upgraded further... and while we know we should put it out of its misery and probably has more vulnerabilities that anything else, it will stay there yet for a while.

We are currently using a D-Link NAS which is even older to backup it, which is completely maxed out from a RAM/CPU point of view, and that probably would be compromised if anyone even looked at it sideways.

I managed to build a netatalk_3.1-18-3 package, and it seems to work fine on an ipq806x. Needs a small patch for a weird error that I will investigate further. Besides that...

How do I bring this package back from the dead? What's the process for that?

11

netatalk package has been working fine for the last week.

Sent pull request to bring it back online. Never done this before... let's see if I got it right.