Getting Started
Getting Started with Netatalk
After following the OS specific installation guides, you should now have netatalk installed on your system.
By default, netatalk will share the home directories of each users on the host system, using the DHX and DHX2 user authentication modules.
Comprehensive documentation on how to harness the full power of netatalk can be found in the Configuration chapter of the manual, and the afp.conf man page.
This wiki pages contains a handful of simple examples for getting started with a baseline configuration, which may serve as a starting point for your deployment.
Check
Check features and paths:
netatalk -V
afpd -V
Setting
Edit /usr/local/etc/afp.conf.
Ex:
[Global]
[Homes]
basedir regex = /home
[Test Volume]
path = /export/test1
[My Time Machine Volume]
path = /export/timemachine
time machine = yes
Network configuration
You should check that your firewall allows TCP traffic.
AFP’s port number is 548. Zeroconf’s port number is 5353.
Extended attributes
It’s recommended to enable extended attributes of the filesystem, if not already enabled by default. On most contemporary Unix-like operating systems, it is enabled by default, for instance with the btrfs file system.
If you use ext2, 3 or 4, you can check it through getfattr and setfattr commands.
If you use ACL, you should check it by getfacl and setfacl commands.
If these are disabled, use tune2fs command or edit the /etc/fstab file.
Ex:
/dev/sdc2 /mountpoint ext4 defaults,user_xattr,acl 0 2
Spotlight Feature
If you want to use Spotlight feature, set spotlight = yes.
Set spotlight = no for Time Machine’s volume. The mining for
sparsebundle is wasteful.
Ex:
[Global]
spotlight = yes
[Homes]
basedir regex = /home
[Test Volume]
path = /export/test1
[My Time Machine Volume]
path = /export/timemachine
time machine = yes
spotlight = no
Footnotes
This is a mirror of the Netatalk GitHub Wiki. Please visit the original page if you want to correct an error or contribute new contents.
Last updated 2025-09-14
