netatalk shares always show up empty
 

howdy all. i'm running the latest netatalk, and exporting some shares with the usual options (have tried all of them...really!). these same shares are exported with both nfs and samba at the same time and they work perfectly. but when i look at the share over appletalk, no files show up even though there are many in there. permissions are all correct by the way.

i have toyed with it for a few days and it seems as though the .AppleDB folder has something to do with it, which if it doesn't exist then i can connect and browse my apparently empty directories, but if it creates the .AppleDB then it won't even let me connect to any of them. What's more, that .AppleDB directory is always empty.

Is there an easy fix that i am missing? Should the .AppleDB folder be empty? Any help would be appreciated as this problem has been getting on my nerves for the past couple of days. Thanks in advance.

Did you look at the file README.hidden-items. Your shared folder must contain the appropriate directories otherwise they won't show up properly. Create a separate unix user for netatalk, and create those directories and chown them to the netatalk user. Log into netatalk from the mac and open up the share. Make sure that the .AppleDesktop .AppleDouble and .AppleDB folders and files in them are world writable. Chmod the files to 666 and folders to 777. You must create the .AppleDesktop directory if you copy executable files to that share, otherwise you get Error 50.

Hope this helps.

I found the solution just under an hour ago! The berkeley db library wasn't compiled with the necessary tags, and then when it was - I was linking against an old one by accident. The debug and message logs don't give any mention that the library is wrong - just a warning to others! But now it works perfectly - without the .AppleDouble and such files. All it needs apparently is the .AppleDB stored somewhere read-write. I had found that page you mentioned a few days ago and it did help - thanks for the reply anyway as it will help anyone who has the same problem. Make sure your berkeley db is compiled properly people! Have a happy new year!

same problem here
 

I'm having the same problem with my netatalk 1.6.4 and RH9 box with it's distro-included db4-4.0.14-20. Can you give some more detail about your solution? What exactly did you have to do with BDB? Uninstall and compile new RPM or compile from source? What options did you have to use for compile to get the right tags?

I recompiled my netatalk with options to give some debugging log messages and it seems that it fails when it tries to create database files after making .AppleDB directory, even with 2777 permissions.

Please also see my post about problems with Panther accessing netatalk shares. Have you seen that happen?

Artur

I'm not sure that I can help you with the problem as it sounds like you're doing everything right already but i'll tell you exactly what I have got running right now since it works for me.

This is all compiled from source on a slackware 9.1 machine, but the resulting programs are run on a separate custom distribution afterwards anyway so that doesn't really matter.

my db is compiled from source. it's filename/version is db-4.1.25.tar.gz.
netatalk is also compiled from source, filename netatalk-1.6.4.tar.bz2.

the configuration and make tags are as follows:


tar -zxf db*.tar.gz
cd db*/build_unix
../dist/configure --prefix=/usr --enable-diagnostic --enable-rpc --enable-compat185 --enable-cxx
make
make install


tar -jxf netatalk*.tar.bz2
cd netatalk*
./configure --with-shadow --with-did=cnid --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --with-ssl-dir=/usr --with-bdb=/usr --enable-timelord --disable-shell-check --enable-fhs --with-cdb --with-mangling
make
make install"


...then i basically keep all the default afpd.conf and such, just add some shares to a blank AppleVolumes.default...for eg:


/mnt/hd "hard drive" allow:nobody rwlist:nobody options:crlf,noadouble,mswindows,nodots,usehex dbpath:/tmp


...all on the same line of course otherwise it will complain. then i run the 4 daemons:


atalkd
nbprgstr -p 4 machine_hostname:Workstation
nbprgstr -p 4 machine_hostname:netatalk
papd
afpd -u -n machine_hostname -U uams_guest.so -g nobody -c 5
timelord


...substituting machine_hostname with the hostname of the machine.

...generally that's all you need to do. wherever you set dbpath should be rw to whatever the user netatalk is running as, and it will create the /tmp/.AppleDB folder for you with about 5 or 6 weird named files in it such as __db.001, __db.002, __db.003, cnid.db, devino.db, didname.db, mangle.db.

That's all I have done and I have managed to get basillisk (windows mac 8.1 emulator) and an imac running macos 9.2.2 to connect to it, haven't tried macosX as I forgot to bring that home for the holidays! ...so i haven't experienced the rearranging files problem yet - sorry! i hope some of this helps anyway. enjoy!