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Netatalk 4.0.0

Netatalk 4.0.0 is available!

The Netatalk team is proud to announce the first release in the Netatalk 4.0 release series.

This release constitutes major changes over Netatalk 3.2, and is recommended for early adopters. We strongly suggest that you take a backup of your production environment before attempting to upgrade an existing Netatalk deployment to 4.0.0.

The standout change in this major feature release is the reintroduction of traditional Macintosh and Apple II networking, namely the AppleTalk transport layer and corresponding tool suite.

This partially reverses the drastic changes in Netatalk 3.0.0 released in early 2012. While the decision made sense in the context of that era, a big part of the appeal of the AFP protocol today lies in the ability to communicate seamlessly between the very latest and very oldest networked Apple machines. Hence, we are excited to bring back the pre-TCP/IP era of Apple networking in today’s release!

In short, we are combining the modern niceties of Netatalk 3 with the backwards compatibility of Netatalk 2, to produce the ultimate Apple networking suite.

Please see NEWS for the full changelog, and find reference documentation in the manual. We are providing a thorough upgrade guide for you who are doing an in-place upgrade of a 3.x or 2.x deployment.

New Features

AppleTalk

The Netatalk AFP file server can once again serve files over AppleTalk, to Macs running System Software 7.x, 6.0.x, as well as networked Apple IIGS and Apple //e machines. In addition, Classic Mac OS 8/9 get the benefit of automatic service discovery that relies on AppleTalk.

We also bring back PAP printing (print from old Macs to modern printers, or a modern machine to LocalTalk printers), an AppleTalk time server, and an Apple II netboot server.

To enable AppleTalk support, Netatalk needs to be built with the -Dwith-appletalk=true flag, and you need to set appletalk = yes in your afp.conf file.

New daemons

New config files

New utilities

Bundled MacIP

We now bundle the venerable macipgw daemon with Netatalk, which enables Macs that for some reason don’t have access to a TCP/IP network to browse the web or do file sharing over AFP.

macipgw was originally written by Stefan Bethke in the late 90s, and has now been bundled with Netatalk with his blessing.

Note that macipgw is not a plug’n’play app. The user needs to configure a network tunnel and IPv4 address forwarding (and most likely NAT, too) for it to work.

Webmin Module

Webmin is a platform for system administration via a user friendly web app. A first-party Webmin module for Netatalk has existed for 25 years, but for the first time it is now bundled with Netatalk proper. You can build it by passing -Dwith-webmin=true to the build system, or download and install the module tarball distributed with this release.

Added build time options

Pass the following options to meson setup build when building Netatalk from source.

Added runtime options

The following options can be enabled in afp.conf.

Dependency Changes

Libgcrypt

Netatalk now requires only Libgcrypt for all user authentication. Dependencies on OpenSSL, LibreSSL, and wolfSSL have been completely removed.

GLib and D-Bus

The dependency on the obsoleted dbus-glib library for the afpstats tool has been removed, and we now use the native GDBus API of GLib itself.

UnicodeData.txt

While Netatalk previously had pre-generated Unicode lookup tables based on fixed Unicode revisions, we now generate this code at compile time using the UnicodeData.txt database file. Many distributions ship a Unicode package that contains this file, but if your distro lacks one you can download it from unicode.org and point -Dwith-unicode-data-path to the location where you put it.

DocBook XSL and xstlproc

Netatalk no longer ships canned troff manual pages, but will generate them on the fly from XML sources using xsltproc and DocBook XSL stylesheets. If either of these dependencies is missing, you can disable the documentation with -Dwith-manual=none.

Deprecated Features

PGP User Authentication Method

The PGP UAM relies on an unofficial Mac OS client that was released as an experiment in the late 90s, and hasn’t been proven working with modern PGP keys. Removed as part of the Libgcrypt migration.

Autotools

The traditional Autotools (libtool / autoconf / automake) build system has been removed, in favor of the Meson build system.

What’s Changed

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Netatalk/netatalk/compare/netatalk-3-2-10…netatalk-4-0-0

Note: The Debian deb package distributed with this release is built for Debian 12 Bookworm.

Release published on 2024-09-29

Generated from GitHub Release Notes

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