Apple Timemachine backups on Debian 8 (Jessie)
Upgrading Debian 7 (Wheezy) servers to Debian 8 (Jessie) proves (unexpectedly) quite rough around the edges.
That's what you get for using a version x.0, we should have known better 
.
And - of course - the release notes follow the common practice of not even mentioning any of the issues we encountered so far.
Ah, well, let's go through the first one:
In Debian 7 (Wheezy) there was netatalk 2.2.2 (packages link). Now during upgrades that package may or may not get removed. There is no netatalk in Debian 8 (Jessie) anymore. Duh. There is in sid (aka Debian unstable) (packages link) so we may see a backport some time. Or not. In any case this is still 2.2.5 at the time of writing and as Adrian Knoth put it in the three year old bug asking for a upgrade to Netatalk 3:
Let's not ship another release without netatalk3, it's embarrassing.
Yes. It is. Removing a working version and not even mentioning it in the release notes is even worse though. So no cookies there.
Luckily the absolutely awesome Debian and greater FLOSS community have sorted 90% of the problem out for us already:
A quick Google search turns up an excellent article on netatalk's wiki that details installing Netatalk 3.1.7 on Debian 8 Jessie. There are two shortcomings to this: First it doesn't compile to .debs but installs besides apt and friends. And second it compiles with Spotlight search, courtesy of Gnome tracker, which doesn't really work well on servers yet. Hence we're lucky that Adrian Knoth's debified install has not yet added the tracker dependencies. It does compile for systemd use (the default for Debian 8 Jessie). If you want to continue using SysVInit, you need to modify debian/rules.
Compiling to .debs becomes as easy as:
apt-get install build-essential devscripts debhelper cdbs autotools-dev dh-buildinfo libdb-dev libwrap0-dev libpam0g-dev libcups2-dev libkrb5-dev libltdl3-dev libgcrypt11-dev libcrack2-dev libavahi-client-dev libldap2-dev libacl1-dev libevent-dev d-shlibs dh-systemd
# in case you want to try the tracker support (you need to ammend the debian/ build config as well)
# apt-get install tracker libtracker-sparql-1.0-dev libtracker-miner-1.0-dev
git clone https://github.com/adiknoth/netatalk-debian
cd netatalk-debian
debuild -b -uc -us
This should leave you with (at the time of writing this):
| File | Function | md5 | sha1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| libatalk-dev_3.1.7-1_amd64.deb | Development files for the libatalk library (dev only) | e5a465e39a8560c919d8db85c8e5a83b | 0b924cf75f22ab42406289c6f18ae0243d6396a3 |
| libatalk16_3.1.7-1_amd64.deb | libatalk library (needed) | 17a3d677ed0b3df1c2f4c1a8ab9045fd | 7345ed3edd442716c99c2fe979140703204c0826 |
| netatalk_3.1.7-1_amd64.deb | netatalk daemons (needed) | c694abca7f3cdc0070b2b3e7d528324a | 932d1e3d5899958f29e79a7ba40e858d4ac272e8 |
Obviously you can download the files above if you run the AMD64 architecture and trust me enough to compile them for you.
Continue reading "Apple Timemachine backups on Debian 8 (Jessie)"