netatalk-classic-20200921 released

I’ve been repairing old 68030- and 68040-class Macintoshes for the past few years. It’s a fun hobby, and allows me to reconnect to an Apple era that was long-gone by the time I joined Apple.

At this point, we have a SE/30, a Classic II, a IIsi, an LC III, a Centris 650, a Quadra 700, and a Quadra 950. All are networked, either through Asanté PhoneNet-to-Ethernet bridges or direct Ethernet.

For the last quarter-century, Netatalk has been the go-to solution for file/printer sharing between UNIX and AppleTalk. Version 2.2.6 was the last release that supported classic DDP AppleTalk (as opposed to AppleTalk-over-TCP/IP, aka “DSI”). Unfortunately, the codebase rotted a bit and needed cleanup to run on current Linux and NetBSD releases.

Now that I’m retired, I have time to work on fun projects like this. I’ve spent the past few months refactoring the 2.2.6 codebase; it’s now at the point where I consider it good enough for public consumption.

I’m calling it “netatalk-classic”. It works out-of-the-box with NetBSD, and seemed okay on Linux once they fixed the Huawei commit that broke AppleTalk (as discussed at https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2020/08/hacking-up-a-fix-for-the-broken-appletalk-kernel-module-in-linux-5-1-and-newer/ — full disclosure, I’m the guy that tried and failed to get the maintainer to fix the broken code that he himself had approved, so I’m a bit bitter).

Release tarball is at https://github.com/christopherkobayashi/netatalk-classic/archive/20200921.tar.gz and the GitHub source is at https://github.com/christopherkobayashi/netatalk-classic

Share and enjoy. Please drop me a line if you find this useful or need functionality that was removed.