AFP Out Of Date In OS X Lion

Well, the word on the street is that Lion will probably be out by the time you read this - Thursday 14th by many accounts.

Hopefully, that will void the 'not supporting betas' excuse.

Some rumours dispute the 14th release.

Once Lion is released I expect NetGear would probably internally distribute support documents regarding it.

Well, Lion itself isn't without its problems - there is plenty to gripe about and I'm anticipating the official release not just so that Netgear get in gear, but so that the rest of the Mac world will start pelting the Apple Discussion pages with bugs that need addressing.

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.

Your information is a little out of date: http://www.netafp.com/netafp-netatalk-2 ... lable-437/ though I agree with the sentiment.

As for forked-daapd, it is not a simple matter of porting - Netgear will have to make *major* updates to their basic firmware to enable forked-daap to be supported (eg a whole new libc)

sphardy wrote:
Your information is a little out of date: http://www.netafp.com/netafp-netatalk-2 ... lable-437/ though I agree with the sentiment. As for forked-daapd, it is not a simple matter of porting - Netgear will have to make *major* updates to their basic firmware to enable forked-daap to be supported (eg a whole new libc)

Thanks for the alternate link about Netatalk 2.2.0, if accurate (the official Netatalk site I also linked to seems to suggest otherwise) then that is good news.

With regards to libc, yes I had read about this problem, but firstly the person who got forked-daapd working on a Qnap managed to get round that same exact problem, and secondly I would suggest NetGear need to bite the bullet and upgrade (at least on the x86 models) their libraries.

Well the rumours are now indicating that Mac OS X Lion may well be released this week and that Apple Stores have been receiving Golden Master copies of Mac OS X Lion.

Well Apple has announced it'll release Mac OS X Lion tomorrow!

mdgm wrote:
Well Apple has announced it'll release Mac OS X Lion tomorrow!

So any ETA or info on a FW update would be appreciated - I am running three Macs with TimeMachine/ReadyNAS so I'm "stuck" with Snow Leopard until that issue is solved.

(Not really "stuck" of course, but I wanted to update at least one of my Macs very soon)...
:wink:

yoh-dah has posted an ETA for x86 on Twitter!: http://twitter.com/#!/yohdah/status/93576735983009792

yoh-dah wrote:
@stannenb We'll have a release for x86 Wed. Sparc release will follow at a later date as we're working out some issues there.