The first article I ever contributed to Techcitement covered my experience trying out the FreeNAS, v8.0 server. Since then, my FreeNAS box has been happily storing Time Machine backups from several different Macs in the household — until now. What changed? OS X Lion!
Apple’s ongoing efforts to increase security of their OS includes disabling support for the DHCAST128 authentication method for Apple File Protocol (AFP), which they feel wasn’t sufficiently secure. iComputerNrd blog offers a workaround by way of issuing multiple terminal commands to turn DHCAST128 support back on again. Unfortunately, even when I follow these steps, I remain unsuccessful in getting Time Machine to communicate with my FreeNAS server. After some more research on the support forum, I discover FreeNAS 8 actually requires other AFP features that no longer supported in Lion, though the workaround gets Time Machine backups going again with some of the other NAS products on the market.
So, why don’t the FreeNAS developers update their software to support the latest authentication method and other features in AFP? It turns out this is something of a political issue within the open source community. Netatalk is the open source code that enables AFP support in Linux or BSD distributions. Apparently, the Netatalk project has lost active developers in recent years, leading the remaining few to write an open letter of frustration to the community. The Netatalk devs apparently feel that with the exception of Netgear corporation, too many commercial businesses have made money using their code while not contributing anything back. Therefore, they’ve held back the release of the latest version of Netatalk — only providing it to paying customers until it convinces enough OEMs to contribute financially to the product’s future development.
Matthew Keller points out some fundamental problems with this decision in a reply on his blog, not the least of which is his argument that it amounts to a violation of the GPL (which the Netatalk source code has been licensed under for many years).
The good news? An update to the original letter made on July 23, says Data Robotics, Western Digital, and QNAP are now contributing to Netatalk development, so the latest Netatalk source will be made available on SourceForge in short order. The FreeNAS developers will surely roll that code in, not long after it’s downloadable.
In the meantime, early adopters of Lion get served a little drama if they opt for a “free as in beer” NAS server!
I heard someone talking at a LUG meeting a month ago who said that Amahi was working on getting OS X Lion Time Machine backups working with it. Yeah its not FreeNAS but alternatives are always cool.
John, yeah… that’s good news. I found out over the weekend that the netatalk developers have finally placed the latest release (v2.20) of their code up on SourceForge, so now it’s just a matter of waiting for the FreeNAS folks to download it and implement it.
I’m confident FreeNAS will support Time Machine backups in OS X Lion pretty quickly. Support is appearing for a number of the commercial NAS products already.
The biggest questions all of this raise are philosophical ones, I guess. It seems to me the netatalk developers adopted an “end justifies the means” strategy, violating the GPL on purpose (temporarily), to ensure the long-term success of what was a dying project. It seems it was effective, but it weakens the trust people have in the open-source community. (If you opt for an open-source solution in lieu of a commercial one, can you be confident it will retain that status?)
Solution found, I used the latest night build from Freenas: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-8-nightly/FreeNAS-8r7209-amd64.iso/download
used AFP and made a apple share.
Time Machine Found a disk to use….
I Use OSX Lion on a IMAC