Server Woes!!!!

Well the Ubuntu server upgrade crashed and burned horribly!! I ran the updates and they went fine, but in the end, the grub bootloader failed badly! I tried booting up with live-cd's, remounted the drives, tried to re-install grub etc. etc. and zip!

So, I blew it all away and started from scratch! Once it was back up I put some of my base software on it and then launched the netatalk install and.... nothing!! The mac color classic couldn't see it! I messed around with settings, over and over and over and nothing seemed to work. Finally, after google searching for forever and trying a million combinations I sat down and... gasp... read the manual! Finally things clicked!

First things first - once I installed the default netatalk packages through apt-get, I noticed that not all of the same services got started that were running before. After digging around I found that I needed to change some lines in /etc/default/netatalk to make atalkd (appletalk daemon), papd (printing daemon) and afpd (file sharing daemon) start up automatically by setting them to run=yes;

# Set which daemons to run.
# If you need legacy AppleTalk, run atalkd.
# papd, timelord and a2boot are dependent upon atalkd.
# If you use "AFP over TCP" server only, run only cnid_metad and afpd.
ATALKD_RUN=yes
PAPD_RUN=yes
TIMELORD_RUN=yes
A2BOOT_RUN=no
CNID_METAD_RUN=yes
AFPD_RUN=yes

Next up I needed to tweak the config files for the services afpd and atalkd. Ok, in /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf I changed it to;

- -tcp -ddp -uamlist uams_dhx.so,uams_dhx2.so,uams_clrtxt.so -nosavepassword

the keys to these settings are bolded above -ddp is needed for appletalk and uams_clrtxt.so is needed to support clear text passwords (again security concern for some, but not worried on my home network). Now in /etc/netatalk/atalkd.conf is set up like;

eth0 -seed -phase 2 -net 0-65534 -addr 1000.142

The key here is that on my network this linux box is the only server on the wire. Therefore, I needed to set up the appletalk daemon to be a seed on eth0 and set the address to 1000.142. Finally after all of this I restarted all the netatalk daemons as before by

/etc/init.d/netatalk restart

Finally firing up the color classic and hitting chooser (for the millionth time!) I saw the server listed and was able to connect to my home directory!! A quick edit of /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default to add in my other directory and I'm now back in business!! I hope this helps someone out there with setting this up! What a huge pain to get all figured out. My couple hour upgrade took a few days of messing around to finally get back to where I was!! Now, back to setting up that printer....