AppleTalk clients see empty volume list on xenial

[Doug Brown]

After upgrading from trusty to xenial, I've noticed that old classic Mac clients logging in through AppleTalk see an empty volume list from afpd. The server appears in the Chooser on the Mac, but after you log in, the volume list being supplied is empty. /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default is being ignored, and only /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.system is being read.

Modern TCP clients don't suffer from this problem and show all volumes properly.

I have narrowed the problem down to this commit:
https://github.com/Netatalk/Netatalk/commit/534030591702e03f002ae3e11f638d57925054e8

At the very bottom, moving the call to getpwnam() broke it; after the change, when an AppleTalk client connects, getpwnam() is no longer being called. This bug makes afpd incompatible with old Macs that don't have AFP over TCP capabilities.

As a workaround, you can add your servers to /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.system instead, but it would be nice if /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default still worked, since it contains the logic that serves users' home directories by default.

[Doug Brown (macg3)]

It appears that there have been several unreleased commits to netatalk's 2.2 branch after the release of 2.2.5:

https://github.com/Netatalk/Netatalk/commits/branch-netatalk-2-2

One of the commits from September 1, 2014 appears to fix this problem, and the other one is probably a fix for the following error I see in journalctl:

afpd[1684]: Failed to add service: Local name collision

Would it be possible to have these patches added to Ubuntu's distribution of netatalk?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[K1773R (k1773r)]

Thanks for the info and workaround macg3, i had the same issue with .default being ignored over appletalk.