Jump to content

Netatalk on Armbian


Jens Bauer

Recommended Posts

In case anyone wants to use Netatalk with Armbian, I'd like to let you know how I succeeded.
 
For a long time, I've wanted to run netatalk on a Linux box.
Even though it always built, I could never connect/log in.
 
Today I tried building it on Armbian (CubieBoard2 is the host), and it was very easy to get it to work.
I basically followed the official HowTo.
 

 

-But with some modification for the ./configure line.
I got an error when using --without-tdb and --without-libevent, so I decided to remove --without-tdb and then do a sudo apt-get install libevent-dev.
I also had problems with the spotlight "tracker", so I left it out.
I placed netatalk in /opt using the following ./configure line:
 
./configure --with-init-style=debian-systemd --with-cracklib --enable-krbV-uam --with-pam-confdir=/etc/pam.d --with-dbus-daemon=/usr/bin/dbus-daemon --with-dbus-sysconf-dir=/etc/dbus-1/system.d --with-tracker-pkgconfig-version=1.0 --prefix=/opt
 
After building, I modified /opt/etc/afp.conf and finally I ran:
 
# service netatalk start
 

 

... and it worked.
There's no spotlight support in my installation, but I don't use it either.
I have no idea how to get it working on Armbian; if you do, please drop a line below. :)
 
Update: If you have (link) problems with 'avahi-client' not being found, your PKG_CONFIG_PATH is missing the directory containing 'avahi-client.pc'
To fix this, first check your PKG_CONFIG_PATH:
echo $PKG_CONFIG_PATH
now find out where the packages are registered:
find /opt /usr /lib -name "pkgconfig"
and see if all those directories are in your PKG_CONFIG_PATH; if not, you can add lines like this one to./.bashrc:
 
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/opt/lib/pkgconfig${PKG_CONFIG_PATH+:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH}"
 
 
.... where you change "/opt/lib/pkgconfig" to the location of your pkgconfig. You can duplicate the line and add multiple paths.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Armbian & Khadas are rewarding contributors

I have no idea how to get it working on Armbian; if you do, please drop a line below. :)

 

Please note that Armbian is not a distribution but a build system instead. You installed Netatalk on Debian 8 which only differs from a Jessie installation on x86 if armhf architecture has different packages.

 

Since Jessie's packages are so horribly outdated and since I was overwhelmed by how easy ZFS support in Ubuntu 16.04 has become (at least on x86) we do all new installations with Ubuntu Xenial only and drop Jessie where possible.

 

I installed Netatalk on Xenial maybe 5 times the last 14 days (always x86) and it worked like a charme, Spotlight support included (but please read the notes, due to limitations of the event mechanism you run pretty fast in troubles if your volumes grow in size). In other words: can't comment on why it doesn't work on Jessie and recommend using Xenial instead.

 

Off-topic: Since I praised ZFS with Ubuntu 16.04 above. When testing a new storage cluster at a customer yesterday we ran into a nice bug with ZFS on Xenial (x86): file deletions didn't release the used space and since we did heavy testing with huge test files we ended up with a huge discrepancy between the really used space (du output) and what ZFS though (df / zfs list). Only restarts solved the problem so currently there seems to be a bug with ZFS on Xenial/x86. Doesn't apply to Armbian at all since on ARM I wouldn't recommend ZFS but btrfs instead when running mainline kernel.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Please note that Armbian is not a distribution but a build system instead.

 

Since Jessie's packages are so horribly outdated and since I was overwhelmed by how easy ZFS support in Ubuntu 16.04 has become (at least on x86) we do all new installations with Ubuntu Xenial only and drop Jessie where possible.

 

Thank you for this information (all of it, not just the quoted).

Going a bit off-topic: Does this actually mean that Debian is being dropped completely and Armbian will use Ubuntu from this point on ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thank you for this information (all of it, not just the quoted).

Going a bit off-topic: Does this actually mean that Debian is being dropped completely and Armbian will use Ubuntu from this point on ?

Desktop image releases will be only based on Ubuntu LTS - easier to support a LTS release when you have to provide additional packages for the HW acceleration stuff.

Server releases will be both Debian and Ubuntu, once Debian Stretch is released (probably in several months) Ubuntu Xenial will be more outdated compared to it in terms of package and default compiler versions, it's just currently the latest Ubuntu LTS release is newer than the latest Debian stable release.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Does this actually mean that Debian is being dropped completely and Armbian will use Ubuntu from this point on ?

 

Sorry, my remark was totally unrelated to Armbian and I failed to differentiate between 'we' (Armbian team) and 'we' (my company and externals). The latter try to switch in customer installations to Ubuntu LTS where possible since... LTS (long term support). That's also mostly x86 where situation is different since kernel is also provided by distro core team (Debian or Canonical) unless you decide to switch from distro kernel to mainline. With Armbian and the +40 ARM boards we support it's different since there's only legacy kernel no one really cares of or mainline (sometimes something in between, see 4.4 LTS kernel for Marvell ARMADA 38x).

 

So while Ubuntu Xenial combined with ZFS is supposed to work flawlessly on x86 (since kernel + DKMS ZFS module comes both from Canonical) situation with the various ARM boards differs since we deal with 2-3 kernel variations per SoC family and there's no one taking care of tight integration between ZFS and kernel (longsleep with his A64 legacy kernel being one exception -- but the last time I tried ZFS on Pine64 it didn't work).

 

Anyway: I just wanted to point out that I built Netatalk on Xenial maybe 30 times within the last 6 months and it always worked flawlessly (though same with Jessie before ;) )

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Anyway: I just wanted to point out that I built Netatalk on Xenial maybe 30 times within the last 6 months and it always worked flawlessly (though same with Jessie before ;) )

 

No problem!  :)

It's actually good to hear some experience.

My CubieBoard2 has a 1TB WD drive attached, which I've formatted as ext4 (due to I didn't know if btrfs was stable at the time; old obsolete web-sites do not get erased, you know).

I know that debian is often "too much behind" (which is why I build and install stuff in /opt). Maybe I'll give Xenial a try at some point in time, but not right now, because my two SD-cards are currently filled.

The first card is the boot-card for Armbian in my CubieBoard2, and as it's being used as a server, I'm not too keen on erasing that card right now.

The other card contains all the tools I need on Windows to flash-program my CS918. I've borrowed an old used laptop (which does not want to start up at the moment) and I hope that I somehow can get the CS918 usable again (hopefully with Linux).

I'm out of money at the moment (where I'm located a new SD-card cost 4 times as much as the lowest price you can get it for in a danish web-store, so I don't just go and buy an empty one).

 

I find Netatalk 3.1.10 really great; much easier to build and successfully configure than earlier versions (I'm thinking v2.xx and earlier). apt-get install on debian will still install an old 2.x.x, thus building one yourself is more or less required.  ;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use - Privacy Policy - Guidelines