miscellaneous, etc.

Running AppleTalk on Linux isn’t anything new, [Netatalk](http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/) has been around for a while. A long time ago, in a job far, far away I used it on an in-house server to support a couple aging Macs that management couldn’t seem to get rid of (and not for lack of trying). I remember that it worked well, but since I left that job I haven’t thought much about it.

A friend of mine recently noticed that [Dreamhost](http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/) (a hosting company) is running AppleTalk IP on there servers, though it is undocumented. I had thought that running AppleTalk over the internet was pretty much a dead idea. Whenever asked I would reply, “Why not just use WebDAV, like Apple does?” After trying it out, however, my mind was quickly changed.

WebDAV is really just a thin layer over the web server and it shows. Progress bars are sporadic and inaccurate, there’s a lot of beach-ball spinning, etc. Running AppleTalk IP through Netatalk, however, was far more responsive and all of the usual features of the Finder are supported.

Security is always my concern, but Netatalk supports encrypted passwords and SSH connections; what more could you ask? PAM support is good and I had it working with my LDAP back-end in no time. Right now I’m a big fan of Netatalk, my OS X clients couldn’t be happier.

The only glitch I came across was when installing the PAM configuration. The installation process installs it for you, but on my system it wasn’t working. I copied the SSHd configuration over the one for Netatalk and everything started working.

If I have any problems, I will be sure to post. If anyone has had any problems with Netatalk, I would be very interested to hear about them.