AppleTalk on Red Hat Enterprise 4?

I need to set up a Linux machine at work to speak AppleTalk.
(This is a legacy application, and converting it to use TCP
instead of AppleTalk is unfortunately not an option.)

I took a machine running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS version
4, and I compiled and installed netatalk-2.0.3. But when I
tried to start atalkd, I got the following errors:

FATAL: Module appletalk not found.
[could not load appletalk module]
Starting AppleTalk services:
Starting atalkd:socket: Address family not supported by protocol
socket: Address family not supported by protocol
atalkd: can't get interfaces, exiting.

I assume this means I need to configure something in the
kernel, and possibly build a new kernel. But I want to do
this as cleanly as possible, with a minimum of hacking that
may make the system hard to maintain through the Red Hat
Network update facility.

How should I go about doing this? If I can somehow do it by
enabling some feature that's already in RHEL4, that would of
course be best -- but I couldn't find any AppleTalk support
built into this system at all. Again, I need to do this in
order to support a legacy system; if I could, I'd switch the
application over to using TCP, but I don't have that choice.

Rich Wales (E-Mail Removed) http://www.richw.org

Rich Wales wrote:
> I need to set up a Linux machine at work to speak AppleTalk.
> (This is a legacy application, and converting it to use TCP
> instead of AppleTalk is unfortunately not an option.)

It's been a *long* time since I used netatalk...Back when RedHat was at
version 6.1 or so, IIRC...But I did get it working.

>
> I took a machine running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS version
> 4, and I compiled and installed netatalk-2.0.3. But when I
> tried to start atalkd, I got the following errors:
>
> FATAL: Module appletalk not found.
> [could not load appletalk module]
> Starting AppleTalk services:
> Starting atalkd:socket: Address family not supported by protocol
> socket: Address family not supported by protocol
> atalkd: can't get interfaces, exiting.
>
> I assume this means I need to configure something in the
> kernel, and possibly build a new kernel.

Correct, you're kernel needs Appletalk support, either complied in, or
as a module.

> But I want to do
> this as cleanly as possible, with a minimum of hacking that
> may make the system hard to maintain through the Red Hat
> Network update facility.
>
> How should I go about doing this? If I can somehow do it by
> enabling some feature that's already in RHEL4, that would of
> course be best -- but I couldn't find any AppleTalk support
> built into this system at all.

You're going to have to build the kernel so it supports it...No other
way around it. The only time updates would be an issue is when RH
updates the kernel packages. And then it should only be a matter of
recompiling again with appletalk...Still an extra step, but not too bad.

I suppose you could also just rebuild the modules, rather than the whole
kernel *and* modules.

> Again, I need to do this in
> order to support a legacy system; if I could, I'd switch the
> application over to using TCP, but I don't have that choice.

Check the How-to for more info :
http://www.anders.com/projects/netatalk/

Also, when I did play around with it, it seemed a bit flakey...Not sure
if it's gotten any better since, but I had issues where it would simply
stop working ( unloading/reloading the appletalk module + restarting
netatalk "fixed" it ) and write issues...Read access worked fine, but
write access was less reliable.


--
- Matt -