afpfs-ng 0.8.1
An open source client for Apple Filing Protocol
Where can I get it?
Download source, Fedora Core 8 RPMs and Ubuntu/Debian packages at the Sourceforge download page.
For details on the development project, check out the Sourceforge development page.
What is it?
afpfs-ng is a client for the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) which will let you mount and access shared volumes from Mac OS X (or netatalk) to Linux, BSD and Mac OS X systems.
There is a FUSE-based client which lets you mount a remote filesystem. It is for Linux and FreeBSD.
There is also a simple, command-line AFP client; think about it as an FTP client for AFP.
How does the FUSE system work?
Here, you'll see me mount a remote volume:
$ mount_afp afp://adevries:passwd@10.211.55.3/adevries /tmp/xa20
Mounting adevries on /tmp/xa20
Login message: This is a login message.
Actually mounting.
Mounting succeeded.
$ ls -l /tmp/xa20
total 0
drwx------ 3 adevries adevries 58 Nov 6 18:24 Desktop
drwxr-xr-x 2 adevries adevries 24 Nov 9 19:28 destdir
drwx------ 3 adevries adevries 58 Nov 6 18:24 Documents
drwxr-xr-x 2 adevries adevries 24 Dec 18 17:19 foo
drwx------ 17 adevries adevries 534 Nov 6 18:24 Library
drwxr-xr-x 27 adevries adevries 874 Feb 9 17:23 linux-2.6.18
-rw-rw-r-- 1 adevries adevries 41863580 Jan 30 18:51 linux-2.6.18.tar.bz2
drwx------ 3 adevries adevries 58 Nov 6 18:24 Movies
drwx------ 3 adevries adevries 58 Nov 6 18:24 Music
drwx------ 3 adevries adevries 58 Nov 6 18:24 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x 4 adevries adevries 92 Nov 6 18:24 Public
drwxr-xr-x 5 adevries adevries 126 Nov 6 18:24 Sites
drwxr-xr-x 14 adevries adevries 432 Dec 15 05:55 testdir
I can also see connection information:
afpfs#afp://username:mypass@10.211.55.2/alexdevries /tmp/xa20 fuse user=adevries,group=fuse 0 0 Here, alexdevries and mypass are the login information on the server 10.211.55.2. The volume name is also alexdevries. /tmp/xa20 is the name of the mountpoint. The user= field is the local user, group needs to be the same the group owner of /dev/fuse. Yes, you will need to put your password in clear text. There is currently no facility to handle open directory. Patches welcome. What can I do with the command line tool?
How good is it?
afpfs-ng is officially labelled as beta, but there are few obvious file-level bugs. There are problems within the FUSE libraries which cause afpfs-ng to hang or stall.
You should report bugs by either subscribing to the project mailing list (available on the afpfs-ng project webpage), or to alexthepuffin@gmail.com
General comments are appreciated also.
What's next?
Major features that are coming up are:
- extensions for graphical clients (gnome-vfs2, konqueror) so that one can browse AFP shares and show resource fork data
- support for older Mac OS 8 and 9 servers (AFP 2.x)
Who wrote this?
afpfs-ng was started by Alex deVries with contributions from Michael Ulbrich, Derrik Pates and others.