AFP Out Of Date In OS X Lion

Sometimes developers are lazy and will refuse to even start work on testing and resolving compatibility problems until after an operating system upgrade is officially released even though they would have access to pre-release versions. Sometimes developers will justifiably be able to blame last minute changes in the new operating system release. Neither case applies here to NetGear.

The ReadyNAS like all NAS boxes supporting AFP, relies on an open-source package called Netatalk and in fact NetGear are the leading sponsor of this open-source project and consistently have a more up-to-date implementation in their products than nearly all of their competitors. See http://www.netafp.com/status-of-netatal ... endor-322/

NetGear do however have to wait like everyone else for new releases of Netatalk to be finished and even as a sponser cannot wave a magic wand to alter the release schedule of Netatalk. However Netatalk 2.2beta has already implemented all the needed changes to fully support Lion for both normal AFP access and for Time Machine access. See http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/

Unfortunately for us all, Netatalk 2.2 is still in beta and not yet officially released, I do not expect nor would I want NetGear to rush out a release based on beta code, so at the moment we all have to wait for the Netatalk team to finish the beta-testing of 2.2 and then issue a stable release. Obviously the sooner this happens the better, I am sure the Netatalk team are working hard to do this as soon as possible as they are clearly aware of the imminent release of Lion as they have been working on Lion specific enhancements.


Now if we do want to have something to gripe to NetGear about in terms of Mac support, it could be either sticking with the obsolete Firefly (aka. mt-daapd) code and not working with the (replacement) forked-daapd team to implement that instead, or we could gripe about the fact that the ReadyNAS cannot be linked to Open Directory. :(

Allgededly forked-daapd has been successfully ported to the Qnap NAS see http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=177&t=37472 I am sure NetGear would not want to be considered inferior to Qnap :) Information about the forked-daapd project can be found at http://www.technologeek.org/projects/daapd/index.html and http://blog.technologeek.org/category/h ... rked-daapd and code at http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=use ... -daapd.git

Note: I would have no problems with NetGear only adding support for forked-daapd to x86 based ReadyNAS units if that makes it more practical to achieve.