Fedora / Netatalk / OS X Lion / TimeMachine

Being the cheapskate that I am, I'm not buying a shiny apple-branded time-capsule for backups when I have a perfectly stylish NAS (since the pic was taken I'm using the via-eden board there's a 1.5TB HDD in the box)

I'd previously used netatalk with leopard under mythbuntu, but following a clean-up and migration to Fedora 16 (Verne) it needed reinstalling (esp as we upgraded to Lion on some of the macs)

So, a HOWTO if anyone is hunting for this and some notes

• You don't need avahi separately anymore - new netatalk includes it
• You need to allow tcp/548 in your iptables rules (I added to /etc/sysconfig/iptables)
  -A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW -m tcp --dport 548 -j ACCEPT
• SELinux. Yeah. probably needs fixing but 'setenforce permissive' worked :-/
• I'm not convinced you need the 'defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1' anymore. 

Here's what I did

1) Create a separate disk partition for time machine and mount it (I'm using LVM and XFS)

$> grep time /etc/fstab
/dev/mapper/linuxvg-timemachinelv /export/timemachine xfs defaults 1 2
$> df -h /export/timemachine
Filesystem                         Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/linuxvg-timemachinelv  200G  6.0G  194G   3% /export/timemachine

2) create a separate user for the backups (not strictly needed but I chowned /export/rimemachine to that user to sort out permissions

#> useradd timelord
#> passwd timelord
#> chown timelord: /export/timemachine

3) Install and configure netatalk (although 2.2.0 is in Fedora 16, I decided to use the rawhide version of 2.2.2)

#> yum --enablerepo rawhide install netatalk

The config files are in /etc/netatalk and (see the gude at An Esurient Trollop ) you'll need to edit afpd.conf
(I added -mimicmodel Macmini and uams_guest.so to -uamlist: I have a ro media share)

- -tcp -noddp -mimicmodel Macmini -uamlist uams_guest.so,uams_dhx.so,uams_dhx2.so -nosavepassword

and AppleVolumes.default

# Share out the Videos
/export/media/Video Videos options:ro,noadouble
#Time Machine
/export/timemachine TimeMachine options:tm

Startup netatalk

#> systemctl start netatalk.service
#> systemctl enable netatalk.service

 So far so good -- assuming no failures you should see something like this in your logs

afpd[28742]: AFP/TCP started, advertising 192.168.1.251:548 (2.2.2)

Now, onto the mac -- I wasn't seeing the host automatically appear in the finder, but a simple command-k (connect to server) and typing the hostname worked (it expands to afp://hostname automatically), and was prompted for my (normal) username and password to connect to $HOME on the netatalk server.

In the time machine preferences I could then select the remote TimeMachine volume on the NAS, enter my 'timelord' username/password combo and it started to so a backup.

More news (and a rest restore) to follow...

Metering

So I finally got round to wiring in the 'Teleinfo' shield into my EDF meter (see my earlier post for more info) and left it running while we're away. Hacked up an initial couple of graphs using trusty gnuplot: exhibits A and B -

It's rather easy to spot where the fridge-freezer kicks in, but more worrying is the fact that the baseline never dips below 170VA. The only things that should have been running in that time was my via-eden server, with one HDD, the livebox and samknows monitoring box. I suspect I need to investigate more.

Made a minor hack to the shield as digi-6 is used by the LED on a nanode - but digi-7 is free.
Details were tweeted over here. Next up is to get it sending the info out to main box (well, another nanode or my bifferboard) and spitting to pachube and / or a jeelabs display board.

Happy Birthday

I finally got round to assembling my birthday present. Shiny toys FTW :-)