It’s a bug in netatalk

To confirm check your /var/log/messages (or /var/log/syslog) and you’ll find that afpd is crashing

Seems to only occur if you also happen to have Samba installed as well.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/netatalk/+bug/810732

I believe this is normal behavior of modern OS’s assuming that the Memory utilization shows that the memory is mostly in the cached memory. If you run the free command you’ll see something like:

# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         15011      10128       4882          0        200       4783
-/+ buffers/cache:       5145       9865

Notice that the cached value is pretty high. If you see that the free value is low and the cached value is high, that is cool. The OS is sucking any idle memory and using it for disk and other caches. But if a process needs memory, it will take it from the cache, not declare its out of memory. This is generally a good thing. So when you do a big transfer it will allocate the memory to caches and then lazily release the caches only when processes need it.

If you see low “free” memory AND low “cached” memory, then you might have a problem…

One thing I did notice on my Ubuntu box though… I did some throughput tests by copying a 2Gb folder/directory of files from my Mac to the server. I watched the men utilization on the server (which has 4Gb of RAM) and noticed that as the files were copying the men utilization climbed till it reached a little less that 4Gb. After 12 hours, it has not dropped back down.

Do you know if there is some kind of caching going on that might have flush parameters for afp?

PS: I am amazed with the > 4Gb/min (66MB/s) throughput to the server I am getting.

Thank you again.

Many thanks for taking the time to put this together and publishing it.

I have followed various threads over the last week about getting Mac OSX client working with Ubuntu Server (10.04) and with no success until now. I expect that shortly I will be nominated for father of the year, after a fresh install of the Ubuntu Server and following this succinct tutorial my son’s MacBook Pro connected no problem after which he promptly kicked off a Time Machine backup.

Brilliant!

1) OSX Leopard and above, no longer allows you to connect to shares using cleartext. You can override this using…
defaults write com.apple.AppleShareClient afp_cleartext_allow -bool YES

2) edit afpd.conf – we need to add the cleartext module to the bottom line you added earlier…
-uamlist uams_clrtxt.so

3) Finally, on ubuntu, you need to create a .passwd file in your home directory, containing your cleartext password
cd ~
echo password > .passwd
chown *YOUR_USERNAME* .passwd
chmod 600 .passwd

4) Restart netatalk

Not that Im recommending plaintext passwords, and definitely not if you’re on a shared LAN, but for my secure home LAN, Im just happy to get it working at all now

Its the third or fourth tute I’ve tried, but Im always having the same problem. I can see my share in Finder, but attempting to connect to it constantly rejects username and password (Im entering the login on the remote linux box). This is a fresh Ubuntu 10 box

Tailing all the log files on Ubuntu, I can see my local Mac connecting to afpd, but there doesnt seem to be any log entries when I hit enter on the login box (or any log entries saying auth failed etc). Do you know of a way I can troubleshoot this please?
Ive tried using both CBD and DBD for the cnidscheme, and also removed the allow:username so according to the docs even guest users should have access

Thanks

I would like to add what worked for me, hope this helps.

Configuring (passwordless) authentication when using ssh from a Mac to Ubuntu

On your Mac:

1. Start a terminal session and go to your home directory.

2. run ssh-keygen -t rsa

Just press Enter on all questions. This will generate a private-public keypair as two files named id_rsa and id_rsa.pub in a .ssh sub-directory.

3. Next you need to copy your public key from the Mac to Ubuntu. The most convenient way to get this done is a script named ssh-copy-id. It is not included in OSX.
I found several other descriptions how to get your public key to the host-computer that should have worked – but for some reason unknown to me never did.
Probably running as a wrong user. Anyway: ssh-copy-id does something right …

sudo curl “http://phildawson.co.uk/ssh-copy-id” -o /usr/bin/ssh-copy-id
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/ssh-copy-id

4. Run ssh-copy-id user@hostnameoraddress

This will create a .ssh directory and a file authorized_keys in the home directory of the user on Ubuntu.

On Ubuntu:

1. Log in to Ubuntu using the same user (!) as before. Run with this identity

chmod 644 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 700 ~/.ssh

2. Change configuration file for ssh

– sudo gedit /etc/ssh/sshd_config

– check whether the following entries are as shown. Uncomment entries if necessary

PermitRootLogin no
RSAAuthentication yes
PubkeyAuthentication yes
AuthorizedKeysFile %h/.ssh/authorized_keys
PasswordAuthentication no

The last entry is optional, but will make sure you will never be asked for an additional password when logging in from the Mac.

3. to make the changes take effect run
sudo stop ssh
sudo start ssh

Everything should be working.

Wow it looks like this is a fundamental bug in Netatalk current release. The only place I found any help though was this post:
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.bugs.general/726770

I wrote the author of the bug report Alan Snelgrove and he said:

Yes I did, and the problem still exists in the git version.

The fix is to find lchdir in etc/afpd/direcory.c and change it to chdir.
There is only one occurrence.

Hmm, That use to work, but I just checked on a recent Ubuntu and I’m getting the exact same behavior as you described (ie the directories in root show up but nothing underneath). I’m using:

/ "Root" options:upriv,usedots
/var "var" options:upriv,usedots


I’ll take a look and see what I can find out…