Re: AppleTalk

[Maxime Villard <max%m00nbsd.net@localhost>]

Le 03/02/2018 à 12:15, Manuel Bouyer a écrit :
> [...] AF_APPLETALK is appletalk over ethernet, without the IP layer.

You're talking about DDP, right? This is indeed appletalk over ethernet
without the IP layer.

I thought that netatalk supported DDP, you could pass -[no]ddp in afpd.conf.

But I've just figured out I was mistaken.

Giving a closer look at the release notes of netatalk 3.0, this version removed
support for DDP. That was in 2012. In the sources of the previous releases,
like netatalk-2.2.6, DDP _was_ supported, and actually it did use AF_APPLETALK.

So until 2012, we had one user of the kernel netatalk code, and back then you
could probably handle very old Macs. Now you can't anymore, see [1]; unless
you run netatalk 2.

Our atalk(4) man page is a bit misleading, in fact the linux one is closer to
our reality. NetBSD supports DDP and AARP: DDP is user-visible with the
AF_APPLETALK socket etc, AARP is internal and not visible.

The rest of the features (TimeMachine etc) work above IP, and are supported
by the netatalk package, in userland directly.

So what should we do? We are left with no user of this code, and as I said,
the other BSDs dropped that several years ago. Cisco dropped it in 2009 [2],
too.

Maxime

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=685878;msg=118
[2] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/ios-nx-os-software/ios-packaging/product_bulletin_c25-520459.html