Debian 5.0.0 was released this past weekend and I thought, what better time to sit down for a few minutes and re-install my basement Debian server. As usual, everything went swimmingly and I was mostly done the install rather quickly (as opposed to the WinXP install I’m doing now, but that’s another story). I did run into troubles when I tried to connect to the server from Leopard over AFP. Seems that Leopard doesn’t allow clear-text passwords to be sent over the wire (which makes sense and I can’t believe pre-Leopard OSX did allow clear-text passwords), but the default netatalk (the Linux/BSD AFP suite) package on Debian doesn’t have encryption compiled in. So that meant I had to build and install my own netatalk package with encryption.
Fortunately for me, Ubuntu is built on top of Debian and so any instructions I could find for Ubuntu should be helpful for Debian as well. I found this article which is not only well written and correct, but also explains how to customize your Finder icons for the file server. And the author provides some nice icons as well, though not one with a Debian desktop. I borrowed the icon and swapped the Ubuntu desktop image for a Debian desktop image. It turned out pretty nice if I do say so myself. The .icns file is free for the taking above (click on the icon). Simply follow the instructions in the article if you want to install it.
Oh and the instructions in the article to build and install encrypted netatalk worked great. Once the Debian server accepted encrypted passwords, Leopard connected with no problem.
Update: I don’t know what I was complaining about three years ago, but AFP doesn’t seem to have a problem with symlinks now. Whatever. That was three whole years ago. I didn’t even have a kid back then.