Discovering and mounting Apple servers

144419855310001 · 12-04-2006, 10:23 AM

Hi

I've been searching on the internet for how to mount Apple mac (OS X) servers. Although there is a fair amount of info about connecting Linux clients to Windows servers with Samba (esp. the Samba howto), I have not found anything about how to do so for apple servers.

I am currenly testing Fedora Core 6 i386 on a network with two Apple servers - a printer server and a personal documents server. Usefully, the printers through the Apple printer server were automatically detected However, I don't know how to go about detecting the Apple server, and then mounting it. I think it may have a fair amount of password protection that the printer server does not, which is perhaps why it was not auto-detected (?)

Eventually I would like to have linux look up the users and authenticate from the Apple server, and automatically mount each user's personal documents folder (Would I need pam_mount for this?). Given that Apple is *nix based, this shouldn't be too difficult?

I have never really done much networking, so if anyone could help me with this / point me to some good howtos I'd appreciate it.

[NB. I know there is a problem with having home folders on Windows partitions due to the fact that Samba does not support sockets, which desktop environments e.g. KDE are especially dependant on. Would there be any such pitfalls with having home folders on an Apple server?]

SteveK1979 · 01-03-2007, 01:24 PM

Hi,

I can't say I've ever tried this set up with my Mac - if anything I mount filesystems or directories from my linux machine via NFS.

Quote:

Eventually I would like to have linux look up the users and authenticate from the Apple server, and automatically mount each user's personal documents folder (Would I need pam_mount for this?). Given that Apple is *nix based, this shouldn't be too difficult?

I'm not sure about the pam_mount to mount the documents folder that you mention, but I imagine it's possible. However, I think you would effectively have to run your Mac OS X machine as an NFS server to make this work reliably. There is a linux client for AFP, but it looks new and appears to currently be categorised as "alpha" software (see http://sourceforge.net/projects/afpfs-ng]sourceforge here for more info. Mac OS X includes nfsd, so I see no problem in doing this. Issuing the command

Code:

man nfsd

in a terminal window will give you more details.

Authentication wise, I would image that you would need to run you Mac as an LDAP server, and have the appropriate configuration on your Linux box to query the LDAP server for authentication. Mac OS X does have an ldap server )at least 10.3.9 does), but I've never used it. You would have to manager the users via the Netinfo Manager application, I think, and then run the LDAP server to allow remote users to query this. I think it's also possible to use kerberos. Have a look at

Code:

man slapd

if you're interested.

My gut feeling about this idea is that unless you actually have the server version of Mac OS X, then I would not do this - I'd actually do it the other way around and use the linux machine as the file and authentication server (be it LDAP, Kerberos, etc) and if the drivers produce reasonable results, probably as a print server also. That's my

Apologies to the vagueness of some of the info here, hope this gives you something to think about. Oh, and just in case you're in any doubt, make sure you have good backups before you start trying something like this. I don't accept any responsibility for hosed machines.

Cheers,
Steve