Chapter 1. Introduction

Table of Contents

Legal Notice
Overview of Netatalk

Legal Notice

The Netatalk software package as well as this documentation are distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. A copy of the license is included in this documentation, as well as within the Netatalk source distribution. An on-line copy can be found at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt

Overview of Netatalk

Netatalk is an Open Source software package that can be used to turn a *NIX machine into a fast, light-weight and reliable file server for Macintosh computers.

Using Netatalk's AFP 3.4 compliant file-server leads to significantly higher transmission speeds for older Macs compared to Samba/NFS, while providing clients with the best possible user experience: full support for Macintosh metadata, flawlessly supporting mixed environments of classic Mac OS and OS X clients.

It ships with range of authentication methods to accommodate any deployment environment. Modern macOS features such as Bonjour service discovery, Time Machine backups, and Spotlight indexed search are also supported.