AFP / AVAHI working with unRAID


Recommended Posts

Hey everyone. Just wanted to start a thread primarily for the mac users among us to discuss the ongoing saga of wanting afp/avahi support for unraid.

 

I was under the (false) impression that netatalk required a custom kernel compile. This seems to be true only if you have a much older mac that requires using Appletalk.  As it stands, if you are using a fairly modern mac OSX 10.3 and up, you can install netatalk and use afp to connect to your unraid box. Knowing this it seems that Tom can let the slack/unraid community fill this need as he continues to focus on more core functionality for unRAID.

 

For the mac users in the crowd.

 

AFP vs. SAMBA

I've had this up and running for a day or two. Download netatalk and install it as you would any other package. Basic usage is the same as smb. To connect to my unRAID box is now afp://10.0.1.7 instead of smb://10.0.1.7

After doing a little informal testing, the speed seems to be the same. Let me repeat that, the speed seems to be the SAME.

 

2.55 GB folder with 92 JPGS.

afp  : 3.58.1 minutes

smb : 3.59.6 minutes

 

The only plus for performance that I can give to afp is purely anecdotal.  When browsing photos and videos over the network using finder/quickpreview, using afp seemed more responsive.  Flipping between 10 to 12 2MB photos seemed quicker. There was no grey loading splash between photos. Launching a 200MB video via VLC seemed to load a second or two quicker.

 

BUT. I can only mount disks, not user shares with afp.

 

AVAHI

This is what allows your server(s) to be seen automagically in Finders sidebar. It's basically open source zeroconfig / bonjour. I turn on my mac or macbook on my server is there in the sidebar. No more go > connect to server.. > afp://10.0.1.7. Again this works fine with unRAID. It's a freely available package for slackware. Installs fine, asks for a few dependencies that are readily available. Best thing is that it will do this for afp or samba.

 

As it stands, I'm sticking with Samba announced over avahi. It enables convenient access to my unRAID server with user shares and from what I can tell, no real performance hit over afp. I just wanted to let everyone know that afp/avahi is possible with no recompiling and just a little work looking through some documentation and conf files.

 

Hope this helps!

Link to comment

Regarding Time Machine.

 

I don't currently use time machine, but from what I have read online, once you have netatalk running and you connected to your unRAID server via afp, you should be able to use Time Machine to back up to your unRAID server. I'm including a link that was instrumental in getting afp /avahi up and running for my box. It will walk you through the steps of setting up the netatalk and avahi config files as well as setting up Time Machine.  It's written with the purpose of setting up a Ubuntu server, so just substitute some slackfoo when necessary.

 

Walkthrough

http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/

 

And if this inspires any other mac users in the crowd who want afp with user share support, this might work? Its called afpfs-ng

From the homepage:

 

afpfs-ng is a client for the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) which will let you mount and access shared volumes from Mac OS X (or netatalk) to Linux, BSD and Mac OS X systems.

There is a FUSE-based client which lets you mount a remote filesystem.  It is for Linux and FreeBSD.

 

http://alexthepuffin.googlepages.com/

 

I haven't played around with it as of yet. But would ultimately like to have afp with user share support. Anyone know of any other alternatives?

 

So there you have it. A little more functionality than I had a week ago. If any other mac users using unRAID have had similar or different experiences please share them.

 

Thanks

Link to comment
  • 1 month later...

I use Time Machine w/Unraid. Originally started by using it over NFS (the hacks to get unsupported network volumes working as a Time Machine target work for both NFS and Samba). That was bad news - Time Machine seemed to have some problems with it, and iTunes REALLY didn't like using that as its library drive. Had a lot of purchased downloads end up getting access errors - had a friend at Apple look a little bit, and its a "you're wrong" "no, you're wrong" kind of situation between linux NFS server implementations and the MacOS client. Bottom line: maybe it'll work with Snow Leopard, but it's not happy currently.

 

Samba seems to work fine. I'd love to do AFP, however, since it's not quite a "seamless" experience mounting samba shares, performing the hack to get them recognized by TM, etc... If something doesn't get mounted right, it's my job as "IT" at home to get it up and running - if it were AFP, I think it would be automatic enough that my wife could just reboot things til they worked, no Terminal necessary. Although Avahi + Samba sounds like it might help a bit towards that goal!

 

Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think afpfs-ng would help for this? It seems to be a linux client for mounting AFP shares. Not sure how this would help enable Unraid to serve up AFP?

Link to comment
  • 4 weeks later...

I'm going to bump this thread simply because I can't seem to get AVAHI to work properly.

 

I've installed the necessary dependencies: dbus, gcc, avahi

 

avahi can start, but spits out the error:

tarting Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Daemon:  /usr/sbin/avahi-daemon -D
Timeout reached while wating for return value
Could not receive return value from daemon process.

 

I think people have gotten this to work and I would love to know how it was done.

Link to comment
  • 3 weeks later...

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.