Re: AppleTalk

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Sat, Feb 03, 2018 at 02:47:16PM +0100, Maxime Villard wrote:
> 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.

yes that's it.

> 
> 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.

My point was just to warn that the netatalk package won't do ethertalk
without kernel support. I didn't notice that netatalk dropped ethertalk
support, and I dropped my last ethertalk device (which was a laserjet)
a few years ago.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--