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  @gregburd here is an out-of-the-blue thank you for giving Berkeley DB a new lease on life! it's great to see your recent activity. it's a tad bitter sweet, because literally weeks ago, we deprecated the BDB CNID backend in Netatalk, which had been its primary database engine for 25 years. regardless, keep up the great work, it's such a neat piece of technology that deserves to live!

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  thanks to the tenaciousness of my collaborator NJRoadfan, the next version of Wireshark will have the ability to dissect two new types of antique Apple network packets: AFP ProDOS Info block -- a part of the older AFP 2.x standard that carries Apple II specific attributes of this file sharing protocol MacIP packets -- IPv4 packets wrapped in a DDP (Delivery Datagram Protocol) header, which is what very old Macs without a TCP stack can use to connect to the Internet old technology is amazing!

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  exciting update from the #netatalk project: I'm proud to present the inaugural release version of the Netatalk Client! this is an AFP client suite, consisting of a FUSE client, a TUI client, with supporting tools, shared libraries, and daemons started out as an experimental fork of 'afpfs-ng' in 2024, I have been tinkering on it on and off, and a few months ago we decided it looked solid enough to move it under the Netatalk umbrella and make it the official AFP client...

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  @nulleric @geerlingguy I like to refer back to the original README on the University of Melbourne website -- they produced a fine lineup of custom Mac software back then! web.archive.org/web/20010303220117/http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/appletalk/readmes/TMLD.README.html sadly, all of their historical source code are released under highly restrictive license agreements. I tried to contact the Regents of the university a few years ago asking to release them under permissive licenses, but never got a re...

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  @nulleric thank you for the call-out, Eric! I appreciate your inspiration and support through this development phase: your piscsi-web Go prototype in particular made getting started with the rewrite project a breeze

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  It's been two weeks already so this is old news, but: Netatalk 4.6.0 and Netatalk Client 1.0.0 are available: Transport has been highly optimized for a notable file transfer speed boost. Caching and locking has been made coherent and correct, enabling true multi-accessor volumes with f.e. NFS and Samba. SQLite is now the default database backend, preparing for the removal of BerkeleyDB. Netatalk Client is now stable and full-featured: a Zeroconf service discovery mode, AFP 2.x protoc...

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  @nulleric @smallsco I dug into icon data (assisted by Claude) and could conclude that the main difference in this case, is that in OS 8.5 the icon resources are stored internally in an 'icns' container which in turn contains the traditional icon resources (ICN#, icl4, icl8 etc.) while the OS 7.x data has the equivalent icon resources individually at different offsets. In conclusion, the actual icon data isn't different in this case, just how they're packaged inte...

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  breaking news: #netatalk 4.4.3 is available, to which you should upgrade your deployments as soon as possible this project has been hit recently by 4 security researchers independently filing (AI assisted) security vulnerabilities in quick succession; out of what ended up as 38 CVEs, we have decided to patch 20 of them in the stable branch. the rest are either spurious or not exploitable / security sensitive at all release notes: https://netatalk.io/4.4/ReleaseNotes4.4.3 security advisories:...

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  after a substantial development cycle, #netatalk v4.5.0 is now out of beta and ready for daily use this the most feature-packed release from this project in a decade; to loosely quote the release notes: making Finder search (i.e. Spotlight) usable out of the box, rebuilding the AFP directory cache for much larger and faster workloads, and tightening security across authentication, filesystem handling, parsers, and build defaults, bringing a new SRP authentication UAM, a pluggable Spotlight bac...

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  the 'nad' tool that's part of the #netatalk toolsuite is getting a fun new feature: the ability to encode and decode MacBinary (.bin) and BinHex (.hqx) if you were a Mac user back in the days you should be familiar: these two were portable formats that allowed you to store Mac files and applications in pure binary form for transmission over the network or onto "foreign" file systems without losing the precious resource fork and other metadata common on...

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  We had a fun breakthrough in #netatalk in recent days: the SRP (Secure Remote Password) user authentication method is now reverse engineered and supported by the open source AFP server. Apple quietly added SRP to the AFP protocol some time in 2010 (our testing indicates OSX 10.7 Lion) but never acknowledged or documented it. SRP caught my eye since it would offer roughly twice as strong encryption as DHX2 which is the final "official" UAM from Apple. Luckily, SRP is an open...

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  #netatalk 4.5.0 beta is now available for adventurous users https://netatalk.io/4.5/ReleaseNotes4.5.0beta we have introduced advanced ARC cache and a wide range of deep optimizations that speed up file operations, especially noticeably when you enumerate a large number of files, i.e. when browsing a remote volume see the new manual chapter on caching for instructions to to configure optimal cache for your deployment https://github.com/Netatalk/netatalk/blob/main/doc/manual/Dircache.md this...