# Netatalk Manual

- Introduction
- Installation
- Configuration
- AppleTalk
- Upgrading
- License

# Installation

> WARNING

> Before upgrading to Netatalk 4 from an earlier version, please read the Upgrade chapter in this manual.

## How to obtain Netatalk

Please have a look at the Netatalk homepage for the most up to date information on where to find the latest version of the software.

### Binary packages

Binary packages of Netatalk are included in the package repositories of some Linux, BSD, and Solaris-like distributions. Installing Netatalk through this channel will give you the most seamless experience, with managed updates when new package versions are available.

See the Netatalk page on Repology for a living list of known Netatalk packages.

You might also want to have a look at 3rd party package repositories for your operating system, such as rpmfind for Red Hat based Linux distributions, OpenCSW for Solaris and its descendants, and Homebrew or MacPorts for macOS.

### Source packages

Prepackaged tarballs with stable releases of the Netatalk source code are available on the Netatalk releases page on GitHub.

The source code is also available from the Netatalk Git repository.

See the Installation Quick Start guide for instructions on how to build Netatalk from source.

## Prerequisites

Netatalk depends on a number of third-party libraries and utilities. There are a handful of mandatory packages that must be installed before attempting to build Netatalk. In addition, there are a number of optional packages that can be installed to enhance Netatalk’s functionality.

### Required third-party software

- Berkeley DB

  The default dbd CNID backend for netatalk uses Berkeley DB to store unique file identifiers. At the time of writing you need at least version 4.6.

  The recommended version is 5.3, the final release under the permissive Sleepycat license, and therefore the most widely distributed version.

- iniparser

  The iniparser library is used to parse the configuration files. At least version 3.1 is required, while 4.0 or later is recommended.

- libevent

  Internal event callbacks in the netatalk service controller daemon are built on libevent version 2.

- Libgcrypt

  The Libgcrypt library supplies the encryption for the standard User Authentication Modules (UAMs). They are: DHX2, DHCAST128 (a.k.a. DHX) and RandNum.

### Optional third-party software

Netatalk can use the following third-party software to enhance its functionality.

- ACL and LDAP

  LDAP is an open and industry-standard user directory protocol that works in tandem with the advanced permissions scheme of ACL. On some operating systems ACL and LDAP libraries are built in to the system, while on others you have to install supporting packages to enable this functionality.

- Avahi or mDNSresponder for Bonjour

  Mac OS X 10.2 and later uses Bonjour (a.k.a. Zeroconf) for automatic service discovery. Netatalk can advertise AFP file sharing and Time Machine volumes by using Avahi or mDNSResponder.

  When using Avahi, D-Bus is also required, and the Avahi library must have been built with D-Bus support.

- cmark, cmark-gfm, or pandoc

  Netatalk’s documentation is authored in Markdown format. The man page sources consist of standards-compliant CommonMark, while the rest of the documentation is authored in GitHub-Flavored Markdown (gfm).

  The pandoc library generates the nicest output, but is significantly more resource intensive than the other two options. The cmark reference implementation is the most widely distributed, but cmark-gfm handles GitHub extensions like tables better.

- CrackLib

  When using the Random Number UAMs and netatalk’s own afppasswd password manager, CrackLib can help protect against setting weak passwords for authentication with netatalk.

  The CrackLib dictionary, which is sometimes distributed separately in a runtime package, is also a requirement both at compile and run time.

- D-Bus

  D-Bus provides a mechanism for sending messages between processes, used by multiple Netatalk features: Spotlight, Zeroconf with Avahi, and the afpstats tool.

- GLib and GIO

  Used by the afpstats tool to interface with D-Bus.

- iconv

  iconv provides conversion routines for many character encodings. Netatalk uses it to provide charsets it does not have built in conversions for, like ISO-8859-1. On glibc systems, Netatalk can use the glibc provided iconv implementation. Otherwise you can use the GNU libiconv implementation.

- Kerberos V

  Kerberos v5 is a client-server based authentication protocol invented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With the Kerberos library, netatalk can produce the GSS UAM library for authentication with existing Kerberos infrastructure.

- MySQL or MariaDB

  By leveraging a MySQL-compatible client library, netatalk can be built with a MySQL CNID backend that is highly scalable and reliable. The administrator has to provide a separate database instance for use with this backend.

- PAM

  PAM provides a flexible mechanism for authenticating users. PAM was invented by SUN Microsystems. Linux-PAM is a suite of shared libraries that enable the local system administrator to choose how applications authenticate users.

- Perl

  Netatalk’s administrative utility scripts rely on the Perl runtime, version 5.8 or later. The required Perl modules include IO::Socket::IP (asip-status) and Net::DBus (afpstats).

- po4a

  With the help of po4a, Netatalk’s documentation can be translated into other languages. It uses gettext to extract translatable strings from source files and merge them with the translations stored in PO files.

- TCP wrappers

  Wietse Venema’s network logger, also known as TCPD or LOG_TCP.

  Security options are: access control per host, domain and/or service; detection of host name spoofing or host address spoofing; booby traps to implement an early-warning system.

- Tracker, or TinySPARQL / LocalSearch

  Netatalk uses Tracker or its later incarnation TinySPARQL/LocalSearch as the metadata backend for Spotlight search indexing. The minimum required version is 0.12 as this was the first version to support SPARQL.

- talloc / bison / flex

  Samba’s talloc library, a Yacc parser such as bison, and a lexer like flex are also required for Spotlight.

- UnicodeData.txt

  The Unicode Character Database is required to regenerate Netatalk’s Unicode character conversion tables.

  This is mostly relevant for developers or package managers who want to regenerate the Unicode source files.

## Starting and stopping Netatalk

The Netatalk distribution comes with several operating system specific startup script templates that are tailored according to the options given to the build system before compiling. Currently, templates are provided for systemd, openrc, in addition to platform specific scripts for popular Linux distributions, BSD variants, Solaris descendants, and macOS.

When building from source, the Netatalk build system will attempt to detect which init style is appropriate for your platform. You can also configure the build system to install the specific type of startup script(s) you want by specifying the with-init-style option. For the syntax, please refer to the build system’s help text.

Since new Linux, *BSD, and Solaris-like distributions appear at regular intervals, and the startup procedure for the other systems mentioned above might change as well, it is a good idea to not blindly install a startup script but to confirm first that it will work on your system.

If you use Netatalk as part of a fixed setup, like a Linux distribution, an RPM or a BSD package, things will probably have been arranged properly for you. The previous paragraphs therefore apply mostly for people who have compiled Netatalk themselves.

The following daemon need to be started by whatever startup script mechanism is used:

- netatalk

In the absence of a startup script, you can also launch this daemon directly (as root), and kill it with SIGTERM when you are done with it.

Additionally, make sure that the configuration file afp.conf is in the right place. You can inquire netatalk where it is expecting the file to be by running the netatalk -V command.

If you want to run AppleTalk services, you also need to start the atalkd daemon, plus the optional papd, timelord, and a2boot daemons. See the AppleTalk chapter in this manual for more information.