Subject: [netatalk-admins] a linux nobody's success story

From: Kerstetter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 1999 21:41:06 -0500

Hello,

Just like to let the new guys out there know that installing Netatalk after
Linux is possible, even for a Mac guy with limited technical experience.

We recently converted our small network from Windoze 3.1/95 to iMacs,
except for the bean-counter's machine that runs Peachtree for Windoze.

To give one of our old Intel-ish boxes a new life we installed Red Hat 6.0
and the Library 6 RPM of Netatalk, downloaded from Red Hat's ftp site:

(ftp://contrib.redhat.com/libc6/i386/netatalk-1.4b2+asun2.1.0a-1.i386.rpm)

The Intel-ish machine has a LinkSys Ether16 card installed at I/O 300 and
IRQ 5. The card was new and cost about $14. There is nothing else on the
machine other than 32 megs of RAM and a modem we no longer use, but worked
nicely to plug a hole in the back of the machine.

We just ran the custom install of Linux, chose the suggested defaults, plus
Samba (for the bean-counter's Windoze machine). We chose the NE2000 driver
for the Ether16 card and pretty much followed Red Hat's suggestions in
their documentation. We are running the GUI interface on bootup.

We downloaded the RPM, used GNOME RPM from the GUI to install Netatalk,
rebooted, and presto, we have a file server for backing up everyone's
machine. Pretty cool, from a Mac user's point of view.

There are configuration things we are not doing, because our needs are
simple. But, gee whiz, for a free OS, this is pretty darn cool. (How does
Red Hat make money at this, anyway? Consulting and support?)

We had tried this about three months back and nothing worked because we
used an exotic ethernet card from the Intel-ish machine's prior use. Once
we switched to an inexpensive, very simple NE2000-clone card, everything
went in smoothly.

For simple, straight-forward installs, there is not much to it. We'll see
how it runs long term.

If you are into compiling the kernel and things such as that, this the
place to look for pretty good help:

http://thehamptons.com/anders/netatalk/

We don't compile in Linux, Unix and MacOSX, at least not yet.

Bob Kerstetter