Netatalk is a freely-available Open Source fileserver that implements the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) 3.4. AFP was the primary file sharing protocol for Apple Macintosh and Apple II computers from 1987 to 2013. A *NIX/*BSD system running Netatalk is capable of serving many Macintosh clients simultaneously as an AppleShare file server.
If you're running a network of older Macs, in particular those running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion or earlier, all the way back to Classic Mac OS, are well served by running a Netatalk AppleShare server. The latest macOS at the time of writing (macOS 13 Ventura) still comes with an AFP client, so Netatalk can act as a seamless bridge between new and old Macs.
Compared to other Open Source file sharing solutions such as NFS or Samba, Netatalk delivers high transfer speeds and full integration of Classic Mac OS metadata (resource forks) as well as user authentication methods (UAMs) compatible with Classic Mac OS clients that don't support modern cryptography.
Modern AFP features such as Bonjour, Time Machine, and Spotlight are also supported.
Bug reports and feature requests can be filed as GitHub issue ticket:
https://github.com/Netatalk/netatalk/issues
Before contributing code to the project, please read the guidelines in the wiki on how to prepare a PR that is likely to be accepted by the maintainers:
https://github.com/Netatalk/netatalk/wiki/Developer-Notes
PRs are automatically picked up by GitHub CI, which runs the builds, integration tests, as well as static analysis scan on SonarCloud.
The latest version of the Netatalk manual can be found at:
https://netatalk.sourceforge.io/3.1/htmldocs/
Each Netatalk component also has a *NIX man page which can be accessed on the command line, f.e. man afpd.
Collaborative articles can be found on the Netatalk wiki hosted on GitHub.
Please feel free to edit existing and create new articles.
https://github.com/Netatalk/netatalk/wiki
Netatalk contributors and maintainers interact with each other primarily on the netatalk-admins and netatalk-devel mailing list.
Subscribe and participate, or read archived discussion threads at:
https://sourceforge.net/p/netatalk/mailman/
The Netatalk website is where new releases and other news about the project are posted.