Installing & Configuring AppleTalk Services on Gentoo

My home network has become increasingly diverse over the last year, having finally grown a couple of fruit-based nodes made by our pals in Cupertino. I’ve been a Mac nut for a long time, but it never made sense to me to set up AppleTalk services on my old Power Computing clone when I dual-booted it with mklinux. (After all, why share AppleTalk when your only Mac is busy running Linux?) But now that my wife and I have our own Macs, it’s definitely a Good Thing to be able to share my Linux box with them. This has allowed for highly efficient uploads of vacation photos to our IDS gallery, as well as comfortable and convenient editing of web documents and other home directory detritus. It’s actually a pretty straightforward process.

Build AppleTalk

First we need to get netatalk, the AppleTalk service for Linux, downloaded and built.

# emerge netatalk

Configure AppleTalk

Assuming you’re just sharing with everybody on your local network, there’s very little configuration necessary. The biggie is setting up some shared directories; we do that in /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default.

# nano /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default

There should be fairly extensive and clear self-documentation in the AppleVolumes.default file, but for illustration, here’s what I have in mine:

~
/home/ids/ "IDS Image Archive"
/home/httpd/htdocs/ "www.growltiger.net"

The ~ indicates that users’ home directories are visible by default. I also share my /home/ids/ to allow easy uploading of photos, and my /home/httpd/htdocs/ to allow me to edit files in the website tree. Add whatever shares are appropriate to your system and needs.

Get Things Started

Time to wrap things up — let’s start the AppleTalk daemon, make it load automatically when we boot up, and make sure our /etc/ tree is nice and happy.

# /etc/init.d/atalk start
# rc-update add atalk default
# etc-update

Now fire up your nearest Mac and try to connect to your Linux box. It should (especially if you’re using the latest OS X version) just appear magically in your Local servers listing. If it doesn’t, try connecting by IP to the IP of your Linux box, either via the Chooser (in OS 9 and below) or by connecting to afp://your.box’s.ip.address/.