Netatalk for OSX Lion Time Machine backup

[whitehat09]

I recently bought a new macbook and would really like to get Time Machine (the apple backup software) to run over my network to my sheevaplug. It runs debian lenny.

So first, if anyone could point me to some really thorough and easy to follow instructions on how to setup netatalk for this purpose that would be great. Secondly, from what I've read OSX Lion makes the network backup process harder than  previous versions of OSX and needs netatalk 2.2beta. If this is true can 2.2 be installed on lenny?

I've taken a crack at this myself, I get as far as Time Machine can see my samba share as a backup drive but when I actually start the backup it errors out.

Any help would be appreciated.

[punaniac]

Hi,

I just solved this problem yesterday. I'm running Debian squeeze on my eSATA Sheevaplug, but that shouldn't make a difference for you.
Netatalk 2.2beta4 is present in current Debian unstable/sid repository. So you'd have to install netatalk from there as explained below.
After installing netatalk, just follow this guide about configuring netatalk on using Debian/Ubuntu as a TimeMachine server: http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/ (Skip section 1 about installing netatalk...)

(1) Add the Debian unstable repository to your sources.list (choose your preferred Debian mirror, I chose the German one):

Code:

echo deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian unstable main non-free contrib >> /etc/apt/sources.list

(2) I use apt pinning to prevent other packages than netatalk from being updated...

Code:

cat << EOF >> /etc/apt/preferences
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 200
EOF

(3) verify the lower pinning priority of unstable vs. lenny

Code:

apt-cache policy

expected result is the pinning priority specified above (=200). This priority must be lower than the other priorities of lenny.

Code:

...
 200 http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ unstable/contrib armel Packages
     release o=Debian,a=unstable,n=sid,l=Debian,c=contrib
     origin ftp.de.debian.org
 200 http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ unstable/non-free armel Packages
     release o=Debian,a=unstable,n=sid,l=Debian,c=non-free
     origin ftp.de.debian.org
 200 http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ unstable/main armel Packages
     release o=Debian,a=unstable,n=sid,l=Debian,c=main
     origin ftp.de.debian.org
...

(4) update the apt database and explicitly install netatalk from unstable

Code:

aptitude update
aptitude -t unstable install netatalk

(5) check installed version of netatalk

Code:

apt-cache show netatalk

expected result is netatalk 2.2beta4

Code:

...
Package: netatalk
Version: 2.2~beta4-1
...

Hope this helps...

Seems that the netatalk developers have released the final version 2.2 source on 27th July. So most probably this will be updated in Debian unstable during the next days/weeks/months... ;-)

Best regards,
Andreas

[whitehat09]

This was great, thanx punaniac.

The only thing I had to change was the cnidscheme, I guess cdb doesn't work with newer netatalk versions and it throughs an error when you try to log into the network drive. Instead use dbd.

Last issue tho. Before all of this I reformatted the drive and did a clean install of Lion. Now I don't see any of the network shares in TM. I don't think I did anything special before, they just got listed automatically.