Making Time Machine work with the ReadyNAS

Jerry Leichter wrote:
As best I can tell, this is done using an undocumented extension to AFP implemented only by Time Capsule (and maybe by Mac OS Server? I don't recall if Time Machine backups to disks exported by Server are supported).

AFP v3.2 adds a FPSYNCDIR call. For lack of an easier way to describe it, this command flushes any writes to a directory to disk, ensuring that what the AFP client thinks is written is actually written (and not cached.)

This has been reverse engineered and available as a patch to the normal "netatalk" open source package (though finding the patch is annoying.)

There are a couple of other things needed to properly advertise an AFP share usable for time machine, such as specific TXT records in the bonjour/avahi responder... All the information is findable via google - though you might have to go through several pages of google results to find it...