Daniel Lange's blog (Entries tagged as apple)

Apple Time Machine backups on Debian 9 (Stretch)

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 13:59:00 +0000

Update from 28.04.2022: Do not use the packages below any more. There is Netatalk 3.1.13 out with fixes for multiple remote code execution (RCE) bugs. Use packages from recent Debian again, they have been updated.

Netatalk 3.1.12 has been released which fixes an 18 year old RCE bug. The Medium write up on CVE-2018-1160 by Jacob Baines is quite an entertaining read.

The full release notes for 3.1.12 are unfortunately not even half as interesting.

Be sure to read the original blog post if you are new to Netatalk3 on Debian Jessie or Stretch!
You'll get nowhere if you install the .debs below and don't know about the upgrade path from 2.2.x which is still in the Debian archive. So RTFA.

For Debian Buster (Debian 10) we'll have Samba 4.9 which has learnt (from Samba 4.8.0 onwards) how to emulate a SMB time machine share. I'll make a write up how to install this once Buster stabilizes. This luckily means there will be no need to continue supporting Netatalk in normal production environments. So I guess bug #690227 won't see a proper fix anymore. Waiting out problems helps at times, too :/.

Update instructions and downloads:

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Netatalk 3.1.9 .debs for Debian Jessie available (Apple Timemachine backup to Linux servers)

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Sun, 07 Aug 2016 12:30:00 +0000

Netatalk 3.1.9 has been released with two interesting fixes / amendments:

FIX: afpd: fix "admin group" option
NEW: afpd: new options "force user" and "force group"

Here are the full release notes for 3.1.9 for your reading pleasure.

Due to upstream now differentiating between SysVinit and systemd packages I've followed that for simplicity's sake and built libgcrypt-only builds. If you need the openssl-based tools continue to use the 3.1.8 openssl build until you have finished your migration to a safer password storage.

Be sure to read the original blog post if you are new to Netatalk3 on Debian Jessie!
You'll get nowhere if you install the .debs below and don't know about the upgrade path. So RTFA.

Now with that out of the way:

Continue reading "Netatalk 3.1.9 .debs for Debian Jessie available (Apple Timemachine backup to Linux servers)"

Netatalk 3.1.8 .debs for Debian Jessie available (Apple Timemachine backup to Linux servers)

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 10:37:00 +0000

The Debian Netatalk3 saga continues at bug #685878. In season 4 of the epic the main issue still seems to be unclear license indications of a (very) few source files. And the usual "you go fix it", "no! you go fix it!". May be the fact that Firefox will be Firefox again in Debian [yeah!] could serve as an inspiration to the Netatalk maintainers?

Ah, well, until we have the eureka moment for Netatalk3 (4?) ...
<pragmatism style="priority-on-users:yes"> ... I'll post my .debs of the new 3.1.8 version of Netatalk as well.

Be sure to read the original blog post if you are new to Netatalk3 on Debian Jessie!
You'll get nowhere if you install the .debs below and don't know about the upgrade path. So RTFA.

The release notes for 3.1.8 don't list anything that makes the update look mandatory but there is a nice compatibility fix for shares also exported via Samba (compatible xattrs handling). And it's faster.

The update instructions (assuming you have installed 3.1.7 before) are:

# install new debs
dpkg -i libatalk17_3.1.8-1_amd64.deb netatalk_3.1.8-1_amd64.deb
# reboot the box (restart of netatalk may not be sufficient)
reboot
# After reboot: remove the obsolete libatalk16 (3.1.8 uses libatalk17)
dpkg -r libatalk16

And here are the files:

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Apple Timemachine backups on Debian 8 (Jessie)

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Mon, 18 May 2015 18:00:00 +0000

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:

# get build dependencies and a few helpers
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)"

iTunes starts but does not show the main application window

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 12:00:00 +0000

Every once in a while iTunes on Windows decides to start but does not show the main application window when trying to sync an iPhone (or any other iDevice).
May be it pops up after half an hour, may be not.

This behavior is caused by iTunes waiting for its Bonjour zeroconf network service. Unfortunately though iTunes is updated very frequently that bug is persistent for years now.
The work-around is easy though:

Open up CMD as Administrator and type

net stop "bonjour service"

and iTunes should pop up its window a few moments later. It will complain about Bonjour not running but that is not needed for anything but network self-discovery. Which you usually don't need anyways.

If you do, you can start Bonjour again with

net start "bonjour service"

anytime also while iTunes is running. Once it decides to show its main window, it's fine to go for the session.

Apple iPhone ring tones Linux style

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 09:55:00 +0000

Apple has crippled the iPhone to not allow normal music files as ringtones. Business decision. Technically any sub 40 second MP4 audio file will do once you rename it to *.m4r and drag-and-drop it to the ringtones folder of your phone in iTunes. Longer ones will work, too. But you'd need a jailbroken iPhone for that as iTunes will refuse to transfer the ringtone file if it's too long. Not much of an issue imho, who keeps ringing your phone for 40 seconds or more?

There's a gazillion websites available telling you how to convert a single .mp3-file to a ringtone with or without iTunes help and there are hundreds of tools doing that for you if you can't find out how to do it with just iTunes itself. Still the ones I tried failed for me as I wanted to convert my 20 or so standard ringtones from the good old Motorola K3 to iPhone ringtones all in one go. Without having to edit each one by hand. They are already nice ringtones and have served me well for years, just too long for the iPhone and in .mp3 format.

The basic processing sequence needed is

Cut the .mp3 down to 39s
Convert the .mp3 -> .wav (with mplayer, normalize output gain while we're at it)
Convert the .wav -> .mp4 (with facc)
Clean up, GOTO 1 for next file

So below is the free shell script to create multiple ringtones in one go on any Linux system. You need to install cutmp3, mplayer and faac for it, so apt-get install cutmp3 mplayer faac on Debian or Ubuntu. cutmp3 is currently not in the portage tree for Gentoo, but you can download an ebuild from Polynomial-C's overlay (mirror). Or you just download the cutmp3 binary from Jochen Puchalla's homepage. There's no error checking in the script, so know your way around the shell before running it.

Without further ado:

#!/bin/sh
#
# convert_to_ringtone file1.mp3 [file2.mp3, ...]
# Placed into the public domain by Daniel Lange, 2011.
#

for arg
do
echo "Processing $arg..."
cutmp3 -c -a 0:0.0 -b 0:39.0 -i "$arg" -O "$arg.tmp"
mplayer -vo null -vc null -af volnorm -ao pcm:fast:file=tmpfile.wav "$arg.tmp"
faac -b 128 -c 44100 -w tmpfile.wav
name=`echo $arg| sed 's/.mp3//g'| sed 's/ /_/g'`
mv tmpfile.m4a $name.m4r
rm tmpfile.wav
rm "$arg.tmp"
echo "$arg done."
done

Update

23.12.14 Apparently the faac package in Debian and Ubuntu has had the MP4 writing capability removed in v1.28-5 and later due to a minor license incompatibility. See the Debian Changelogs. Duh.

faac (1.28-5) unstable; urgency=low
  [ Andres Mejia ]
  * Disable mp4v2 support.
    This only disables mp4v2 for the faac utility program. The faac
    utility is GPL-2 but the mp4v2 library is MPL-1.1. The two licenses
    are incompatible with each other.

So ... unfortunately you have to built faac from source yourself or pin the v1.28-4 version which is identical except for the castration anyways.

Random distro dev: "Why oh why doesn't my distro ever head mainstream...?"
Hint: Because of stuff like this.